Sprint is most powerful smartphone, the Mogul(PPC-6800) , is an evolutionary upgrade to their older and much-beloved PPC-6700. It’s slimmer and neater, and updates its Windows Mobile software.

The Mogul(PPC-6800) 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.

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.