The D-Pad is a way of navigating on a PocketPC. It was originally concieved by Compaq on their Ipaq series and later copied by most other manufacturers of PocketPC. Goal is to make one-handed operation a lot easier without having to use the touchscreen.

It is a five-way navigation option: up, down, left, right and action. In many applications it has about the same function: up-down scroll up/down one page (exception is Internet Explorer, but that behavior can be corrected) or object (for example in file explorer), left-right moves left/right or jumps one day backward/forward. THe action button executed the standard action associated with the object.

In Windows Mobile 5 the softkeys, two hardware buttons and an on-screen display of them, were introduced to complete the navigation in combination with the D-Pad.