Although it was first announced back in October 2007, together with the Ultimate 9502, only recently did i-mate's Ultimate 8502 smartphone get the chance to be approved by FCC and get ready for an official launch in the US. Sure, the FCC approval doesn't mean the device will be immediately available, but it still represents good news for the US users who are waiting for the smartphone.

The Ultimate 8502 is one of the latest devices from i-mate's Ultimate series and it packs lots of advanced features into its business-looking case. First of all, Ultimate 8502 comes with quad-band GSM connectivity with GPRS and EDGE, plus tri-band HSDPA / HSUPA, hence its owners will enjoy the benefits of fast data transfer speeds as well as the ones of fast Web browsing. Moreover, the 8502 offers a nice 2.6 inch touchscreen display with 240 x 320 pixels and 256K colors, a full QWERTY keyboard for easy text input, built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, USB, TV-out, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash and video recording, a Qualcomm MSM 7200 processor at 400 MHz, 128MB of RAM, 256MB of ROM and microSD card support.

Running on Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional, the smartphone includes lots of useful applications, like Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Office, Windows Media Player 10, file manager, push email and so on.

i-mate Ultimate 8502 weighs 4.94 ounces (140 grams), measures 4.57 x 2.16 x 0.59 inches (116 x 55 x 15 mm) and comes with a Li-Ion 1530 mAh battery that should provide up to 4.5 hours of talk-time and up to 180 hours of stand-by time.

For the moment, there are no details about when the 8502 will be commercially available across the US, or about its retail price. Anyway, knowing that the smartphone can be bought in Australia for 999 AUD (around $935), it will probably retail in North America for a similar price.