In less than a week Cingular Wireless will add Hewlett-Packard's (HP) long-awaited iPAQ hw6920 Mobile Messenger series to its smartphone lineup. The Pocket PC Phone is being made available through its B2B sales channel for $360 with a two-year service contract. HP is also offering the hw6920 directly, but for $599 a la carte.

The hw6920 joins Nokia's E62 communicator and self-branded 3125 (also known as the HTC Star Trek) as recent additions to Cingular's swelling number of supported smartphones. Additional handsets expected to join these ranks in the near feature include the Cingular 8525, RIM BlackBerry Pearl, and the Palm Treo 680, in addition to a version of the Windows Mobile Treo 750, offered exclusively by Vodafone in Europe currently.

Importantly, the global positioning system (GPS) enabled hw6920 will arrive with Cingular's first location-based service (LBS) application, also announced today. Called TeleNav GPS Navigator, the software provides turn-by-turn directions, more than 10 million points of interests, and search tools, accessible via voice and onscreen to customers when driving or walking.

The service, which goes for $9.99 per month for unlimited trips and $5.99 for ten, is also available now for the Cingular 8125 Pocket PC Phone and the Treo 650. It requires a Bluetooth GPS receiver for these non-GPS phones.

According to Cingular, this is only the first of many LBS solutions to be offered by the carrier. “The launch of TeleNav GPS Navigator is an important first step in what will be a comprehensive portfolio of compelling and cost-effective LBS offerings for our world-class roster of business customers that we will be building," said Jeff Bradley, Cingular VP of business data services.

Additional LBS solutions available to iPAQ users include Microsoft Pocket Streets or HP Navigation Maps and Software.

The hw6920 (see our first look here) appears to be very similar to past HP Mobile Messenger offerings like the hw6515, which is also carried by Cingular: There's the same square 240 x 240 pixel resolution, 64k color 3-inch display, and a QWERTY thumb-keyboard, for example.

It has something past iPAQ phones don't, however: Five types of wireless networking.

There's Quad-band (850/900/1800/1900) GSM voice for those who travel abroad, GPRS/EDGE for high speed cellular data services, the aforementioned GPS chip, Bluetooth for headsets and other personal area networking accessories (like printers), and Wi-Fi, the new kid on the block for the Mobile Messenger series. Last and least of all there's legacy infrared.

As with the hw6515, the new iPAQ's dimensions and weight, at 4.6 x 2.8 x 0.7 inches and 6.33 ounces, are more PDA than phone like.

HP moved this Messenger up to Windows Mobile 5.0 with support for the Exchange Security Feature Pack and Direct Push on-device client, putting BlackBerry-like mobile messaging front and center.

Inside the new iPAQ is 128 MB of ROM and 64 MB of RAM plus a 416 MHz Intel XScale processor, up from 312 MHz in the previous model. Unlike the hw6500 series, HP didn't go with two expansion slots with the hw6920. This smartphone nixes full-sized Secure Digital cards, leaving only the miniSD variety.

As with the earlier model, you can snap pictures and take video through the Pocket PC Phone's 1.3-megapixel camera, which has a flash. The Photosmart-compatible camera enables users to capture and share photos and videos wirelessly. Like past iPAQ phones, there will be a version of the Pocket PC Phone, the hw6925, with the camera and one, the hw6920, without a shooter for security conscious enterprises.

HP rates the new iPAQ's 1200mAH removable battery for 4 hours talk and up to seven days standby time.