Mobile Phone Review

It looks like another Windows Mobile 5.0 PDA-style phone from HTC, but the P3300 comes with something a little different from other HTC handsets.

Yes, it has a large 2.8" 240x320 pixel touch-sensitive display, quad-band GSM, GPRS and EDGE support, WiFi and expandable memory, but the clever thing about the HTC P3300 is that it comes with inbuilt GPS hardware and TomTom satellite navigation software. There’s also a 2.0 megapixel camera and FM radio.

Actually, there’s nothing really groundbreaking in the HTC P3300. TomTom software (and other satnav applications) have been available for the Windows platform for some time, and it’s not even the first integrated phone/GPS system we’ve seen (see the Benefon Twig Explorer, for example). However, it is a neat package and it should help to avoid some of the integration issues that people sometimes have getting their phone/GPS/PDA setup working.

This is a Windows Mobile 5.0 device, so the HTC P3300 is featured Windows smartphone. Readers of Mobile Gazette will no doubt know what sort of features go into a handset like this, so we won’t dwell on that.

The TomTom navigation software on the HTC P3300 comes in two flavours, a "taster" edition with a single city map (actual maps to be confirmed) or the "premium" edition which comes with the maps of Western Europe preloaded. The latter is quite a large dataset, around 2Gb on a dedicated TomTom device, so presumably the "premium" version will have a high capacity microSD card.

You’ll notice that the HTC P3300 has a traditional "tall" screen arrangement, rather than the "wide" screen with most dedicated satnav systems. It’s a matter of personal preference, but we suspect that most people would prefer a wider display.

Still, it’s pretty clear that the HTC P3300 will be appealing to customers, and it looks like a very capable all-in-one device from a technical point of view.

From a commercial point of view, the HTC P3300 is also pretty clever. One thing that is often overlooked about satnav systems is the need to keep them up to date. A new set of Western Europe maps from TomTom is about £100/€150 or so, and then there’s an extra charge for TomTom premium services such as traffic reports and the new Safety Camera function in version 6 of the TomTom software. We don’t know quite what the commercial arrangements between TomTom, HTC and any carriers are, but it’s clear that a device such as the HTC P3300 could be a good revenue earner in this respect.

HTC say that the P3300 should be available from October 2006.

You can tell at a glance that the HTC S620 is a messaging phone, but we’ll come to that later. This is a quad-band GSM phone with GPRS and EDGE data (but not 3G), it comes with a 320x240 pixel display, microSD expandable memory, stereo Bluetooth and of course a QWERTY keyboard. The HTC S620 also has WiFi support.

The display is a 2.4" TFT panel, but it isn’t touch sensitive. Instead, the HTC S620 comes with a "JOGGR" control pad on the side that can be used with a thumb. The wide screen is useful for web browsing and document viewing.

Messaging support is very much Microsoft-orientated, with Direct Push email and standard internet protocols. There’s also an MSN Messenger client installed.

As you would expect, the HTC S620 can view most types of Microsoft Office documents plus Adobe Acrobat PDF files. But, unlike the BlackBerry 8700 series, this is also a capable multimedia device with an MP3 player, camera and other features. That’s not necessarily what many corporate customers want, but the drawback with Windows devices is that they pretty much come with the whole package.

It’s not the first handset to be positioned as a "BlackBerry killer", and it certainly won’t be the last. But if you’re running a Microsoft shop then it looks to be a pretty reasonable proposition. HTC say that the S620 should be available from October 2006.