Yesterday morning, after all kinds of FedEx drama and two days of sitting in customs, I recieved an i-Mate K-JAM. The K-JAM is one of the branded versions of the HTC Wizard, direct from Dubai, United Arab Emerates. Qtek is also releasing this phone, and for a little less money- the difference is, i-Mate has support available in the USA.
The Wizard's form factor is in my opinion, the perfect device. I upgraded from a Treo 650, and I also loved that phone, but it lacked in several areas:
- I was amazed how quickly the QWERTY keyboard grew on me, so much so that a QWERTY keyboard is now on my "MUST HAVE" feature list for any future phone. The keyboard on the Treo was very, very cramped, and with my giant American man hands, typing anything other than very quick and brief SMS messages was less than fun. (Still a BILLION times better than T9 text input, however.)
- Palm OS. While I LOVE the simplicity of Palm OS, it is just so far behind Windows Mobile in features and usability that often times the Treo seemed like the Palm V I had in high school, duct taped to a GSM phone, with a keyboard added and the screen upgraded to color. I prefer the Palm OS UI to Windows Mobile because there are very few things you need to do in Palm OS that require more pointing accuracy than your pinky provides. This allowed for easy one-handed operation, and only needing the stylus out for entering contacts, or playing games.
- You know the nice feeling you get from using a Mac, how everything just jives together, looks similar, works similar, etc? Well, if you took the exact polar opposite of that, you'd have the Treo's build of Palm OS. The SMS and Email programs were too basic, the phone application was stupid, the higher-resolution (Non-standard for Palm OS?) screen provided some hilariously pixelated icons in most programs not specifically designed for the Treo, and to make it all worse- To get basic functionality of... just about any cell phone, you needed to buy two applications: Butler, and Technician. For $30. What do these KILLER APPS do that are worth $30? Butler makes the LED blink when your Treo requires attention instead of doing nothing, and Technician allows you to customize your ringers and alert tones.
Don't even get me started on the hilarious adventure you'd need to go on if you wanted to use a SDIO WiFi card, modding an XBOX is easier.
- The Treo needs to be reset way too often for the reset button to require taking off the battery cover. Expect your Treo to hard lock in any number of fun ways at least once a week.
- Proprietary dock connector- WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF USB.
Here are some side by side shots of the Wizard, RAZR, XBOX Controller and the Treo:
The Wizard is actually smaller than the Treo 650 is. It is just as thick, and with the lack of antenna stub, and being rounder, it has a smaller profile. The Treo seems heavier, which I'm guessing is because of the massive battery inside of it. The Wizard uses a battery which is much closer to the size of a standard cell phone battery.
Reception seems a little better on the Wizard than the Treo. Judging by how many bars of signal you have is amazingly unscientific, but I usually have 1-2 bars in my office with my Treo, and my Wizard fluctuates from 3-4. Both get full signal from my apartment. I can't really accurately comment on the battery life of the Wizard yet, but judging by the battery level, and what I've done with it so far, it seems decent. It is no battery champion by any means, but doesn't appear to be any worse than the Treo.
The keyboard on the Wizard is nice and wide, easily allowing for quick two handed typing. The keys respond very similar to the keys on the Treo, with the same amount of key travel. My only critique on the keyboard is I'd rather they ditched the two soft buttons on top (Since they are redundant buttons with the ones on the face of the device) and instead added a dedicated number row to allow the symbols to be put on the correct keys instead of Shift+H being %. Typing speed is much closer to typing on an actual keyboard, thanks to the extra width and size of the keys.
When you slide the keyboard out, the Wizard automatically switches to landscape mode. When you slide it back in, it switches back to portrait mode. Depending on what application you're using at the time this can be anywhere from near-instant to taking 2-3 seconds. The keyboard has a very satisfying 'click' that securely holds the keyboard both in and out.
For some stupid reason, ClearType does not work on Landscape mode. You can enable it using a registry hack, but I figure I'll just wait for the next Windows Mobile 5 ROM patch, as it's probably disabled for a good reason. One feature I hope is added in future firmware updates, is to have the device be turned on automatically when you slide the keyboard open. Right now if the device is sleeping you have to open the keyboard and press power. I can understand the other face buttons being locked in sleep mode to keep you from bumping them and calling people in your pocket- But how would you accidentally slide the keyboard open?
The Wizard takes Mini SD cards, I ordered a 1GB card and am very happy with the performance. On the Treo, accessing the SD card caused a small noticable lag. On the Wizard, functions that involve the storage card seem just as fast as using the internal storage.
People have been criticizing the Wizard for having a slow processor. It has a 195Mhz OMAP850, which I've read on a few forums is a dual core chip. (I'm not sure if that is true or not.) It doesn't seem slow, at least compared to the Treo. It can play video without studdering, and make calls using Skype over WiFi. I can't really think of anything else I'd ever want to do with the device that would be more processor intensive, so I'm thinking it should handle everything else fine. If it's not fast enough to handle games, oh well. That's what my PSP, DS, and GBA Micro are for.
WiFi?! Yes, the Wizard has onboard 802.11b/g. It connected without issue to my WEP protected network at the office, as well as my WPA protected network at home. With the WiFi set to a 50/50 balance between range and battery life, I seem to have about 75% of the range I have with my PowerBook. The one dumb thing I've found so far is that when you turn WiFi on, you're more or less turning GPRS off. The Wizard (As far as I can tell) will sit and wait for a WiFi network it can connect to, instead of falling back over to GPRS/Edge. In an ideal world, if it detected a friendly network, it would use WiFi, otherwise it would use GPRS/Edge. I'll keep my fingers crossed for Windows Mobile 5 upgrades that allow this.
With an unlimited data package with a carrier that offers Edge data speeds, the WiFi connection is kind of pointless for anything other than using Skype to make VOIP phone calls. (Which in itself is kind of pointless since I never come near touching the amount of minutes I have.) I get in the area of 25kbyte down depending on my signal level, which is more than enough for most web browsing, and Exchange server synchronizing.
Speaking of Exchange, I'm literally AMAZED with the functionality of Exchange + a Windows Mobile 5 device + Outlook or Entourage. I originally was just going to use my POP email and not do anything fancy, but a friend of mine recommended 4smartphone.com's Exchange server services. With an Exchange server plugged in to the settings in the Wizard's ActiveSync, and connected to the same server in Entourage, any changes I make are updated over the internet- most of the time within seconds. One of the things I've always hated about PDA's was that having to sync all the time was annoying. I always found myself saying, "Why can't my Treo be smart enough to listen over Bluetooth and be like 'Oh hey my paired computer is in range, send me whatever updates you have, OK?'"
That's exactly what ActiveSync and Exchange do, except without any wires, over cell towers. I'm serious when I say EVERYTHING gets mirrored, if I'm sitting in my car and I get an email on my Wizard, and I read it, it will be marked as read when I get back to my computer and look at my email. If I add an appointment on my computer, it gets thrown on the Wizard. All without me having to do anything. 4smartphone wants something like $80 a year for this functionality, which just makes the $100 a year I spend on .mac seem like the biggest waste of money in the entire universe.
Windows Mobile 5 as a whole is practically alien technology sent back in time from the future in comparison to Palm OS. The address book is awesome, the email/SMS functionality is amazing. The only thing that is kind of goofy is how it handles MMS picture messages, they're not grouped in the same inbox as SMS messages, and they use a different UI for composing them which pretty much requires the stylus. For how little I use MMS, it doesn't really matter as long as it works.
The camera on the Wizard is no worse than any other camera phone. It claims to be 1.3 Megapixels, but the picture quality is about the same as my Treo, which was only VGA. The Wizard does have a white LED as a 'flash', but it isn't bright enough to light anything up that is more than a few feet away from the camera. If you could turn the 'flash' on and off whenever you wanted with a button on the side to just use it as a flash light, that would be much more useful than a laughable flash. (This is supposedly being fixed in the next ROM update.) Movie quality seems to be the same as the Treo as well. Good, but not great, a little better than your average camera phone.
The Wizard doesn't have a goofy proprietary dock connector, instead it has a standard mini-USB plug in the bottom that will seemingly charge off of any USB port, even USB 1.1, as well as any USB charger. I cannot even tell you how happy I am to get away from goofy proprietary docking adapters.
The Bluetooth on the Wizard works fine, range seems average, and it is rumored with the next firmware upgrade it is going to support Bluetooth 2.0, which would just be awesome.
I was originally concerned with getting the Wizard, because there is currently no way to sync a Mac with Windows Mobile 5. ActiveSync doesn't exist on OSX, and MarkSpace's Missing Sync that Apple reccomends for Windows Mobile devices doesn't do Windows Mobile 5, and they don't really have an ETA for when it will. I can sync all of my data over the air using Exchange, and I can install programs by sending the .cab file over Bluetooth to the Wizard. I'm very happy how this works, and am OVERJOYED I don't need to use a buggy syncing program. The only thing I miss is that with Missing Sync on my Treo I had the ability to plug my Treo in, and access the memory card like it were a USB drive. That was awesome... But, if the Wizard supports Bluetooth 2.0 in the future, the speed to send files back and forth wirelessly won't be an issue.
If I had to pick something to complain about with the Wizard, it would be the stylus. The stylus holder doesn't run the whole length of the device, so the stylus telescopes. It's only about a half inch shorter than the Treo stylus, but it lacks the weight since it is hollow, which is much more annoying than it being smaller. Another thing I could whine about is that it has a 2.5mm plug for headphones like most phones and PDA's instead of the 3.5mm standard headphone jack. You can get an adapter, it would just be nice to not have to. Windows Mobile 5 is still in its early stages, and there isn't very much 3rd party software for it yet. If you install incompatable Windows Mobile 2003 software, instead of giving you any kind of warning, your phone will just do reboot loops, which end in having to hard reset. It would be nice if they made this point a little clearer, instead of letting you install whatever you want.
Overall this is seriously the perfect device. It has stereo speakers that actually don't sound like crap, the speakerphone volume is very loud, as is the ear piece volume. The vibration alert is just as strong as my old Primeco Nokia phone, which could wake the dead it shook so hard, rather than the wimpy Treo vibrator. The gain control on the microphone is very good, and according to the few people I've talked to using the Wizard they've made note that I sound better than I did on my Treo.
So, if you're looking for a new Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone device, and you've got some cash to burn... The Wizard it the ONLY way to go. QWERTY keyboard, WiFi, Quadband, possibly future Bluetooth 2.0, nothing else can touch it right now in regards to features. If you like the Sidekick, but hate the limited OS and T-Mobile service, the Wizard also would fit the bill nicely. I am VERY happy with my purchase.
If anyone has any questions, I can answer them on this uber-phone.
P.S. If I need to take pictures of wrinkly 40 year old Hooters waitresses holding the Wizard to make this a credible review, just let me know.
10-07-2005, 14:18
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