The specifications are amazingly familiar and so is the packaging. Regular readers of this column may know what we're talking about just from an outline of the features: a combination General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) telephone and personal digital assistant (PDA) sporting a 206 megahertz StrongARM processor and weighing in at about 200 grams.
It is the O2 xda introduced earlier this year by British mobile phone firm mmO2 - but it is also the dopod 686 launched yesterday in Beijing by a unit of state-owned China Electronics Corp (CEC). The reason for the similarity is that the design and the hardware came from the same company, Taiwan's High Tech Computer (HTC).
In the case of the dopod, assembly is at CEC's plants in Hebei province. Both machines use the Windows Pocket PC 2002 operating system but dopod worked with Microsoft to customise the device for the mainland market, adding a dictionary, better handwritten character recognition and a phone dialler that works with the Internet protocol phone cards so popular in China.
There are two interesting things about the introduction of the dopod in China.
For one, it is the first combination GPRS phone and PDA in the China market and is available later this month, not long after the xda hit the market in Europe and Hong Kong.
In the past, mainland technology consumers would have to wait a year, maybe two, before the latest mobile phone or PDA hit their shores.