Well, I can honestly say that this one caught us 100% by surprise. While attending Samsung USA's 2004 Showcase event in New York last night, I stumbled onto a number of new Samsung handsets for the US market that have yet to be announced. Samsung typically lets the networks make the product announcements, so it isn't all that unusual to find them showing a new product that nobody has officially said anything about. Samsung i730 The most interesting product, by far, was the i730. It is a CDMA 800/1900Mhz EV-DO device that runs the second edition of PocketPC 2003. An EV-DO PocketPC device is cool no matter how you look at it, but Sprint has already announced such a device. The surprising part to me was that the i730 has a sliding thumbboard. We aren't allowed to show you photos of the keyboard itself (yet), but we can show you the rest of the device's body. Samsung decided to not include a charged battery in the i730 they were showing, so we were not able to get an impression of the 65K color TFT display or really test out the keyboard properly, but first impressions were good. The display is, from what we are being told, a 2.8" 240x320 unit. The device itself has 64MB of RAM, voice dialing capabilities, and stereo speakers built-in. There is also a SDIO card slot on the side, and a megapixel camera located up top. Samsung was not willing to discuss who would be offering the device, but I'd guess that it is most likely Verizon. Hard to say since Sprint is also going to be rolling out their own EV-DO network, but Verizon still seems like the most likely candidate. Samsung said that the device should start shipping in the first half of 2005.