Anyone familiar with semi-recent smartphone news will remember the Benq P50. Announced in 2004 as a competitor to Sony Ericsson's P-series and the Palm Treos that had begun sweeping the business world, it was two years before the much-awaited handset hit shelves... only to be hopelessly under powered and sub-spec’d compared to a field full of alternatives that had moved on in leaps and bounds. Let's hope that Benq don't make the same mistakes with the new P51, FCC documentation of which has been unearthed, and which is obviously an attempt by the manufacturer to bring the smartphone back up to date; the most notable addition is GPS.

Still sporting the sober grey business suit and looking a little like a Sony Ericsson from the back, the P51 is a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM phone running Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone Edition with a 2.8-inch touchscreen. Other specs are as follows:

• Bluetooth, WiFi (802.11b/g) and integrated GPS
• Full QWERTY keyboard
• 1.3 Megapixel camera
• Preloaded with the standard Office mobile app
• Other software of note: Skype, Sprite Backup, Java Manager, Webaroo and a Digital Media Server app to connect to UPnP media devices
• Mini-USB port, extra SIM storage slot, and SD slot

Can Benq get the P51 released before every other phone has some sort of 3G capacity? Right now I’m struggling to see why I’d buy this over, say, a Treo 750v - build-in GPS is good, but I’d be far more likely to use high-speed data.

FCC says: bring in the P51 with GPS, Benq! [jkontherun]

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