Could the Sprint Mogul be the enterprise iPhone?

By Keith Shaw on Mon, 06/18/07 - 9:08am.

Sprint Mogul: The enterprise iPhone? While the mass of tech fanboys continue to drool over the upcoming release of the Apple iPhone (11 days people!), Sprint today announced a phone that might get some enterprise telecom managers drooling as well.

The Mogul by HTC from Sprint will be the first CDMA device in the U.S. that includes Windows Mobile Professional Edition and will support Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A network (via free software upgrade later in the year). The Mogul is the successor to Sprint's PPC-6700 device, and features the same slide-out QWERTY keyboard, large touch-screen and five-way navigation button. The Mogul will be available this week for $399.99 (with two-year agreement) online and through Sprint's business channel, with retail availability in July.

Sprint says the Mogul offers 20% more battery life than the PPC-6700, has 256MB of internal memory with support for 2GB of additional memory via microSD card (the phone will ship with a 512MB card). The Mogul is thinner (4.33- by 2.32- by 0.73-inches) than the previous model and includes an internal antenna.

The Mogul also has a 2 megapixel digital camera (with flash, auto-focus and camcorder features) Bluetooth (including the dial-up networking profile and stereo profile) and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity for connecting at hot spots or other non-EV-DO locations. On the software side, the device will support HTML e-mail and Microsoft Office Mobile (Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, Pocket Outlook, Internet Explorer Mobile, Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, ActiveSync, Pocket MSN and PDF Viewer). The Mogul is also the first Sprint device to support Java applications.

And yes, the Mogul will be able to play music and watch videos. Sprint says it will support On Demand video downloads and by mid-July users will be able to perform over-the-air downloads from the Sprint Music Store (something the iPhone still won't be able to do).

While the Mogul is unlikely to get as much marketing hype as the iPhone, enterprises might be more gaga over this device for its faster network access, enterprise e-mail support and application support.