Sprint's most powerful smartphone, the Mogul, is an evolutionary upgrade to their older and much-beloved PPC-6700. It's slimmer and neater, and updates its Windows Mobile software. Even so, as with most Windows Mobile touch-screen devices, more horsepower would be better.

Is that greedy of us? The Mogul rocks a 400-MHz Intel PXA263 processor in its slimmed-down body (4.3 by 2.3 by 0.7 inches, 5.8 ounces); the stubby add-on antenna is gone, and the Mogul actually fits into a (capacious) pocket. As on the PPC-6700, there is a wealth of buttons around the outside: Quick-access keys for e-mail, Internet Explorer, and the programs menu; pick-up and hang-up keys, soft keys and a cursor rocker stud the front. On the sides, you'll find a camera button, voice dialing, "OK," two network buttons (one for the network manager and a Wi-Fi switch), a power button, a voice dialing button and a BlackBerry-style scroll wheel. There's a slot for a microSD card (up to 2GB; a 512MB card is included) on the bottom.

Yup, welcome to Windows Mobile, in this case a relatively unadulterated Windows Mobile 6 Professional. The crazy array of hard buttons on the Mogul is this device's way of giving you quick access to some of Windows Mobile's many functions and of letting you move through the very stylus-centric interface without using a stylus. Once you master the buttons, a surprising number of tasks can be done with the Windows key, the scroll wheel, and the OK button, reducing the number of times you have to pull out your stylus.

Want more buttons? Slide the Mogul's keypad out; the screen rotates, and you have a full QWERTY keyboard. It isn't my favorite—the keys are mushy and have very little travel, none of the satisfying "click" of a BlackBerry key. But you can get used to it, and the spring-loaded slide is solid and satisfying.

The Mogul makes a decent but not great phone. It paired with our Plantronics mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets easily and without clicking sounds. Sound through the earpiece is loud and clear, and the speakerphone goes to an adequate, if not thundering, volume, though we were disappointed with the transmission quality from both the microphone and speakerphone: Calls sounded very scratchy on the other end. Voice dialing, irritatingly, requires recording tags for each name. Reception was middling for a Sprint phone. Battery life was very good, with more than five hours of talk time.

The Mogul did very well on SPB Benchmark speed tests, as is to be expected from a 400-MHz device. Oddly, though, it felt slightly slower in practice. We saw some delays in screen redrawing when rotating the screen, and videos in Windows Media Player were jerky even though TCPMP video benchmark tests gave good results. Skype for Pocket PC didn't work at all. We hope these are minor issues that Sprint can smooth out in a firmware update.

Otherwise, the Mogul handled everything Windows Mobile we threw at it. Music, including protected music, plays over wired or Bluetooth headphones. You can edit documents in the included Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, and we immediately downloaded Opera Mobile for superior Web surfing over both EV-DO and Wi-Fi. Windows Mobile 6 also makes it easier than ever to set up new e-mail accounts. Though like other Windows Mobile devices, the Mogul doesn't support MMS, we got SMS and Yahoo! accounts up and running in minutes. Sprint has thrown in a few of its own software programs too: the useful Handmark On Demand information application and a version of its Groove Mobile Sprint Music Store client. The music store client is, alas, pretty useless, because it keeps a totally separate music library from Windows Media Player; just ignore it.

The Mogul comes with 151MB of available storage memory, which makes it easy to save tons of programs. When you run them, of course, you'll periodically be interrupted by out-of-memory errors in the 47MB of execution RAM and have to close some, because this is Windows Mobile, which doesn't close programs when you're done with them.

The new Internet Sharing app makes it very easy to use the Mogul as a modem on Sprint's EV-DO Rev 0 (alas, not Rev A) network; we got speeds of around 750 Kbps downloading and 70 Kbps uploading on a Dell Inspiron laptop. You can make calls while surfing the Web on Wi-Fi.

The Mogul has a 2-megapixel camera, but we weren't impressed: It wasn't very sharp, it blew out bright areas, and it had serious blur problems in low light. It has a lot of scene modes, though. The 176-by-144 video mode takes unusually jerky 15 frames-per-second videos.

Do I sound slightly lukewarm about the Mogul? Maybe, but I honestly recommend it nonetheless. For Windows Mobile aficionados, folks who want to use Windows Media Player on their PCs, or anyone that needs Windows Mobile's tight connection with Exchange 2007 servers—this is Sprint's best option. In fact, it's more powerful than the Motorola Q, and Sprint's other smartphones are all beginning to look outdated. If the compromises of Windows Mobile daunt you and you want something simpler, look at the BlackBerry 8703e. Otherwise, definitely pick this up if you're looking for modern smartphone power on Power Vision.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 37 minutes
SPB Benchmark: 359
CPU index: 1,713
File system index: 144
Graphics index: 4,518

Compare the Sprint Mogul by HTC with several other mobile phones side by side.