O2 XDA Mini-S: Phone or Pocket PC?

Being a bit of a gadget lover, one of my favourite times of year comes at the end of February. More personal than Christmas but every bit as exciting, the end of February marks my mobile (or ‘cell’ for you wacky Americans) phone contract renewal. A magical time of year when I can use the bargaining chip of my contract to wrangle myself a cool new phone. In the past I’ve always stayed away from smartphones, reasoning that if I want a pocket PC I’ll buy a pocket PC, not some poor hybrid which compromises on both areas to deliver a cut down PDA and a low quality phone. All the smartphones I’ve seen have either been too big to be a phone, or too slow to work as a PDA. Then I read about the latest HTC products. HTC is a manufacturer of handsets who provide carriers with branded versions of one of their handsets. They currently specialize in Windows Mobile-based handsets such as their flagship product the HTC Universal, which offers 3G video calling but is a little on the large size, being more of a ‘mini laptop’ than a mobile phone.

The HTC Wizard is the phone I became interested in, though; it’s much smaller than the Universal and is sold in the UK as the 02 XDA Mini-S (among other things). Despite being the same size as your average mobile phone, the Mini-S offers a full Qwerty keyboard and reasonable Windows Mobile 5 performance. Before we look at the Mini-S in use, let’s get the tech specs out of the way:

• QuadBand GSM/E-GPRS (EDGE) 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
  
• Processor: Texas Instruments OMAP 850 @ 200MHz
  
• Memory: 128 MB of ROM and 64 MB of RAM
  
• Display TFT LCD – 2,8″ QVGA
  
• Bluetooth
  
• Wi-Fi 802.11b
  
• IrDA
  
• 1.3 Megapixel camera
  
• Stereo speakers
  
• QWERTY keyboard – horizontal
  
• Mini USB (slave only, no host)
  
• Card Slot: mini SD
  
• Operating system: Windows Mobile 5.0
  

You might be looking at that measly 200MHz processor and thinking it’s a bit slow, but using the Mini-S doesn’t feel that way. There’s occasional slow down when converting the screen from portrait to landscape, but nothing too drastic. In any case, this article is about what you can do with the Mini-S, not its performance stats, so let’s leave the benchmarks on the bench where they belong and get some real-world experience with it.

The Mini-S arrives in an absolute beauty of a box. The top section of the box slides out like a drawer and at the same time, in perfect synchronized harmony, the bottom half slides out in the opposite direction. The top half contains manuals and cables neatly packaged in their own sections whilst the bottom half contains the device itself, nestled snugly in foam padding.

The first thing you’ll need to do when you get your Mini-S is actually set it up. To do this you put in the SIM card and switch it on.

Not too strenuous. During the initial startup the Mini-S will prompt you to select one of 3 setup types:

• Corporate: No O2 software and no settings – basically a completely blank template. Only select this option if you want to spend an hour or so typing in settings to get your device working, or if you are actually using the Mini-S in a corporate environment.
• Basic: Minimal O2 software and fully functional settings. I use this option. It doesn’t have all the hand-holding of the full install, but it’s much faster.
• Full 02 install: Full 02 software installed. Slow as a pig in molasses. Looks pretty, though.

As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of the full install. The slowdown with all the software installed is really noticeable (it can take up to 30 seconds to switch from portrait to full screen mode) and all you get out of it is a prettier menu system. Go for the basic install and save yourself some hassle.

After installing the O2 software you might think the installation is finished but whatever you do don’t start using it yet. If you do the device will likely hang, forcing you to restart and lose those all-important network settings. In a minute or two, another screen will pop up asking you to select your tariff type (pre-pay or post pay) and location (UK or Ireland). The default settings were good for me, so I hit ‘ok’. The device now reboots and you’re good to go.

We’re not quite finished with the setup yet, though. There’s a couple of third party applications I like to add that should really be included as standard with Windows Mobile. The first piece of software I put on any Windows Mobile device is Wisbar Advance from Lakeridge software.

In addition to giving you a cascading menu, this nifty piece of software lets you actually close programs (Windows Mobile has a system where clicking the ‘x’ on a program minimizes it rather than closing it) and skin your device how you want. One problem I have noticed with the latest version of Wisbar is that the cascading menu system is at too high a resolution on a Windows Mobile phone, so I use an old theme (from version 1.x) with an old style menu.

The next piece of vital software is Tweaks2K.

This allows you to play about with a lot of settings on the Windows Mobile device, including an important one ‘show network folder’. With this option selected we can now use the Mini-S to browse network folders and play media files over the network.

Now we’ve tweaked those settings what can we actually use the device for? Well, you’re only really limited by the size of the device. For example, you can use terminal services to connect to a network PC and control its desktop (just like remote desktop in Windows XP) but the size of the screen is going to cause you some issues. You can browse the Internet to your heart’s content, but again the screen is going to cause issues. One thing I do use mine for is Netremote.

Using this pretty nifty software you can use your Mini-S as a universal remote for your Media Center PC!

Let’s have a closer look at the ergonomic characteristics of the Mini-S.

Here’s the device closed in ‘phone mode’:

You can see the screen is large and well proportioned. Various soft keys are strewn around the device, here we see (top left) the messaging soft key, (top right) the Internet Explorer soft key, (bottom) the two menu soft keys, and the phone soft keys. Pressing the left phone button brings up the virtual keypad, which is the only part of Windows Mobile I really don’t like. The phone application needs a serious overhaul. At the moment, it’s functional but hardly nice to look at. The O2 version of this phone goes some way towards making the Windows Mobile dialer easier to use with its neat ‘smart dialing’ feature. This looks up numbers from your contacts on the fly as you start to type in a phone number, and really makes the process easier. The device slides in half along its middle revealing the keyboard as seen here:

The keyboard is surprisingly pleasant to use given its tiny proportions. The keys have a nice ‘clicking’ action to them and, while small, are perfectly sized to use with your thumbs whilst holding the device. Sliding the keyboard out of the device automatically sets the screen to landscape mode, which is a nice touch. Since this is a Windows Mobile 5 device, all the built-in applications can take advantage of the landscape screen, which is especially nice for Internet Explorer and Pocket Word.

The top of the device contains a Mini-SD slot and the power button

Whilst the bottom has (from left) Headset socket, Mini-USB connection, slider for releasing the battery compartment and the holder for the stylus.

The stylus deserves a special mention, pulling it out cause the stylus to telescope out to twice its docked length. Once extended like this it’s a very reasonable size and makes navigating the menus and applications on the device a breeze.

The back of the device is fairly non-descript. A sticker indicates that this is a Windows Mobile 5 device, and the discreet lens / LED flash hints at the presence of the 1.3 megapixel camera.

Unfortunately, the camera is a bit of a letdown. Pictures, even in bright natural light, look murky and poorly defined. Playing with the myriad options can yield better results, but pictures will never be a strong point of this device.

Of course ergonomics are nothing without applications, and the Mini-S comes with a plethora of useful software including:

• Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
  
• Internet Explorer
  
• Pocket MSN (including hotmail and messenger)
  
• terminal services client
  
• calendar, contacts etc…
  

Basically, everything you need from a PDA and more besides. It’s all well integrated as well. For example, you can browse through your contacts and send them an email or ring them from the same screen. None of this is new of course, but it’s nice all the same. Also nice is the ‘today’ screen, which shows you any upcoming appointments and outstanding unread emails in one easy-to-understand screen. Again this is nothing new, it’s been there since the Pocket PC days, but it’s this sort of thing that makes a Windows Mobile device stand out from your standard phones.

One thing that does disappoint with this and other Windows Mobile-based phones is the actual phone dialer software. To be frank, although it’s usable, it’s clunky and outdated. I’ve accidentally hung up on people a couple of times, although that might be more to do with me not making many calls and thus not learning the software rather than an inherent fault with the software. Undeniably though it needs a serious aesthetic revamp.

After several weeks of using the Mini-S as my main phone, I have to say it’s pretty much the best phone I’ve owned. Size and weight-wise it’s perfect for carrying round in my pocket and the functionality it offers through it’s Windows Mobile operating system and full keyboard puts it ahead of any other phone OS and on a level with much bigger smartphones / mini-laptop type devices. I love this phone and can highly recommend it to anyone in the UK looking for a decent smartphone. Incidentally, the phone costs œ80 on contract, which is significantly cheaper than a similar Pocket PC, and you can get an upgraded version next year when your contract is up again.