The HTC Wizard: Mobile Genius - Software and Connections
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The device comes with Windows Mobile 5 preinstalled, which includes Pocket Office, Pocket MSN and all the applications you'd expect like a basic file explorer, contacts manager, calendar and media player applications. The great thing about the Hotmail component of Pocket MSN is that you don't have be a member of the premium Hotmail service for it to work. You can just tap in your Hotmail email address and password, and download all of your emails. Simple.
Pocket Office features Pocket Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint applications which are all fully functional and compatible with their desktop counterparts. This isn't a review of Windows Mobile though, so I won't go into much more detail on the OS.
You also get a pretty impressive range of connection modes, including WIFI, Bluetooth, IR and of course GPRS (without which phone calls wouldn't be possible). It is the first phone on the market to use the 802.11g wireless specification, which gives it a maximum transmission rate of 54Mbps. Connecting to your wireless router or to public hotspots is very straightforward and stable.
One impact of the wireless connection however is its drain on the normally very good battery life, giving you perhaps five hours of use as opposed to over 24 hours at minimal use (switched on and used throughout the day for short periods). According to the manufacturer it gives up to 200 hours of standby time. Testing the battery life can be complicated due to the many factors that affect its performance, but for the record I haven't experienced any battery life problems.
One of the aims of mobile operating systems at the moment is to achieve truly one-handed operation, and while many of the features of the phone and within applications can be accessed and controlled perfectly adequately with one hand, there are still some things that require the use of the stylus, like activating the Start menu for example (although you could easily enough reprogram one of the hard buttons to do this, I'm sure). It is possible to use the slide out keyboard with one hand, but far quicker and more comfortable to use two.
The hardware keyboard is not the only supported text input method either; there is also a full replication of the keyboard on-screen and the stylus can also be used with the letter recognizer, block recognizer and the transcriber. The letter recognizer clearly needs little explanation -- draw a letter on screen and it is converted into typed text. The block recognizer provides what attempts to be a quicker method of typed input by allowing the input of letters and numbers using single strokes of the stylus. I say attempts because it can be more time consuming figuring out which single stroke to use for letters that normally require several strokes when actually writing (you know, that thing you used to do with your hands and a pen). There is also the transcriber, which is more of a handwriting recognition application that allows you to enter curvasive or printed text.
One feature that I'd like to mention, which may seem a little trivial, is that as well as syncing data with the sync cable, you can also charge the phone. The is very different from other PDA phones that I've owned and is an excellent feature, which is why I felt the need to detail it.
A great thing about Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) is that it is hugely documented, developed and described online and there are a large number of excellent forums to find out more about its features, help you improve and customize it and save you in the event of disaster. There is also a colossal amount of software available for it, much of it freeware. I know there is also a great deal of support for other popular mobile operating systems such as Symbian; perhaps it is purely the hardware, but compared with Symbian, I have had more success in finding applications and games that work and run well on the WM5 platform.
Overall, the quality of the phone is excellent; it looks sleek and professional without looking boring. The design is rugged and sturdy (I dropped it from a height of about one meter onto concrete accidentally just after I got it) without being cumbersome or too heavy. It has a rich feature set, easy to use OS and the capabilities to be either an office on the go or a multimedia portable gaming unit, whichever you want to use it for. I think it achieves everything that HTC set out to do when they designed the phone and has few if any shortfalls. In my opinion, it's definitely a recommended product and a capable converged device.
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