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A new smartphone that runs Windows XP and blends in PC features is starting to generate buzz, though some analysts are questioning its purpose and practicality.

Chinese company In Technology Group has designed a pocket-sized device called XPPhone, which the company says is the first device that blends smartphone, PC and mobile Internet device functions. It runs on Microsoft’s Windows XP OS and is powered by an “AMD Super Mobile CPU,” according to the company’s Web site.

ITG declined to provide details about the processor, but an AMD spokesman said the XPPhone uses a Geode LX chip, which runs at 533MHz and draws less than 1 watt of power. The company is now taking pre-orders for the device, which could start shipping as early as December, a company spokesman said in an e-mail. He declined to provide pricing information.

Calling it an “interesting” device, some analysts said there is an appetite for devices smaller than netbooks that can deliver PC functionality. Smartphones are morphing into devices on which users can surf the Internet and read Word documents, and the XPPhone could be pushing the ante with support for Windows XP.

The device is the latest in a proliferation of new products and form factors that put mobile technologies in one box, said David Daoud, a research manager at IDC. “The netbook is one articulation of this trend, but this particular example illustrates other attempts to stimulate demand with new concepts,” he said.

Daoud said that the addition of XP to the XPPhone brand is an attempt by the promoters to identify it closely as a PC rather than compete in the extremely competitive smartphone or mobile device market. “Yet it also uses the word ‘phone’ in its name to remove any ambiguity over its real function,” he said.

The product’s success could hinge on the kind of appetite wireless carriers have for the device, Daoud said.

However, some analysts surmised that Windows XP OS is too resource-heavy for such a small device.

Smartphones usually have a targeted and fairly light OS that allows for specific functions without getting in the way of usage, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. Handheld phones mainly run Windows Mobile, a watered-down version of Windows XP designed for mobile phones. Other phones may run Android, a Linux-based OS specifically designed to run applications on mobile devices.

“Why would anyone want a phone that runs XP? That’s a little like putting a jet engine inside a compact car,” Gold said. “I can’t imagine what XP in a device will do to battery life.”

The OS itself would make the smartphone vulnerable to the problems traditionally experienced by PCs running XP. “Does this mean users can expect blue screens of death?” Gold asked. Loading applications like Microsoft Office could also challenge the resources of this device and bring it down to its knees, Gold said.

The XPPhone includes a 4.8-inch LCD touch screen that displays images at a resolution of 800 by 480 pixels. It includes a removable lithium-ion battery, which provides a talk time of about five hours and standby time of about five days, the company said. Under real-life conditions, the device would operate for between seven and 12 hours. The XPPhone can receive calls and text messages, and a thumb keyboard slides down from the bottom.

It weighs 400 grams (0.88 pounds) with the battery and is 2.5 centimeters thick, with support for up to 64GB of solid-state drive storage or 120GB of hard drive storage. It supports multiple 3G wireless options including HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access), HSUPA (high-speed uplink packet access), CDMA2000 (code division multiple access), EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized), TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) and TD-HSDPA. It also includes support for Wi-Fi.

Though the device is thin and interesting, it could be about cost, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

“It could be just an opportunistic ‘burst’ product, not meant to champion a category, just make a few bucks on some cheap parts,” Kay said. AMD stopped developing Geode chips earlier this year, while Microsoft has already released two successors to Windows XP, which was launched in 2001.

Semiconductor analyst Dean McCarron said the XPPhone is perhaps the first device of its kind he has heard of with the Geode chip. However, even today the Geode chip could make for a reasonable competitor against some Arm processors, said McCarron, who is principal analyst at Mercury Research. Arm processors are used in billions of mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone.

However, Geode — which is based on an architecture introduced in the mid-1990s — is generations behind the new architectures like Intel’s Atom processors or even AMD’s most power-efficient Athlon Neo chips, which are designed for ultraportable laptops, McCarron said.

It’s good to see when “somebody does something cool” with a Geode chip, said John Taylor, an AMD spokesman. However, he maintained that the company has no interest in the mobile Internet device or smartphone space for now, and instead will focus mobile efforts on developing chips for ultraportable and standard laptops

Virtual file server company Egnyte is releasing BlackBerry and Android clients for its service, letting users of those smartphones get to the files in their online storage from their handsets. (The service already works on Windows PCs, Macs, and iPhones.) As part of the new rollout, the company commissioned a survey of small businesses about their smartphone usage.

Many of the results are pretty much of what you’d expect from a survey conducted for a storage company that’s announcing smartphone support: 74 percent of respondents, for instance, said that “accessing and sharing file server data via their smartphone would lead to increased productivity and better business decisions.” More surprising: 48 percent of the people who took the survey said that RIM’s BlackBerry is the most innovative smartphone, vs. 29 percent who said the iPhone is.

But one tidbit intrigued me the most: A quarter of the survey respondents said that they use their smartphones more than they do their PCs for business use. I’m not sure if that sounds low or high, but as smartphones get smarter over the next few years, you gotta think that many of us will come to see them as our principal computing devices, and consider traditional PCs to be the secondary, special-purpose gadget.

In terms of hours logged with each device, my laptop is still more essential to my work (and play) than my phone. Emotionally, though, I’m at least as attached to my iPhone as I am to any full-blown computer I own. When it’s useful, it’s exceptionally useful-and I sure spend less time futzing with it than I do with any Windows or OS X machine. And it gets the opportunity to save my bacon more often than my laptop does, because I take it absolutely everywhere. (As you may or may not know, I wear my phone around my neck on a lanyard so it’s always within reach and I never lose it.)

For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com. Story copyright © 2009, Technologizer. All rights reserved.

Leading analysts are making different predictions about the impact of Windows 7 on PC sales, and the reasons seem to boil down to the time frame considered, plus the perspective of the particular analyst.

“Windows 7, with its polished user interface and several new consumer-friendly features, will likely reduce the gap in perception between Windows and Mac OS,” wrote Annette Jump, research director in Gartner’s Worldwide (WW) Client Computing Team,” in a blog on the Gartner site.

But on the other hand, “Gartner does not expect that Windows 7’s release in October 2009 will have a major boost on WW PC sales in the fourth quarter of this year,” according to Jump.

Quite conversely, Chris Whitmore, a hardware analyst for Deutsche Bank, wrote this week in a research note: “We expect Windows 7 to spark a multiyear upturn in PC unit growth.”

Obviously, one of these analysts is saying “no,” and the other “yes,” on the question of whether Windows 7 will bring a leap in PC sales. Gartner’s Jump, though, is talking about the fourth quarter of this year, whereas the Deutsche Bank analyst — who was originally quoted in a WSJ article — is referring to a multiyear time frame.

Whitmore, in fact, also appears to be thinking that a surge in sales won’t come immediately after Windows 7’s release. He goes on further in the research note to project that PC unit sales will pick up significantly a quarter or two after Microsoft has done new OS upgrades.

Speaking with me on the phone this afternoon, Steve Kleynhans, another Gartner analyst, got very specific about his own opinions on the question.

“The effect of Windows 7 is going to come in two waves,” predicts Kleynhans, a research vice president at Gartner.

The first wave of Windows 7 sales will be driven by consumers, and the second one by business customers, according to the analyst.

Both sales waves will be in turn impacted by economic factors, and these still remain iffy.

“We’ll see how Christmas does among the consumers,” he says. Some households that want new Windows 7 PCs just won’t have enough money at hand to do so this holiday season, he suggests.

The business market, on the other hand, isn’t likely to see a boom in new PC sales until the end of 2010 or even the start of 2011, according to Kleynhans.

Although Windows 7 will play a key role, businesses will also be feeling a need to replace their PCs, something that many of them won’t have done for two-and-a-half years. “So Windows 7 is nicely timed,” Kleynhans told me.

But even then, the size of the sales boom will hinge on the state of recovery from the recession. Like consumers, businesses today don’t tend to have “hidden piggy banks” that will allow them easily go out and buy new PCs, according to the Gartner analyst.

“Corporations might buy cheap PCs, and that isn’t necessarily a good idea,” he observes