HTC's Big Switch in Handhelds

UPDATED 3/27/2007

I'm reporting live from the big CTIA mobile phone and services show here in Orlando this week. The PC World team is catching the first wave of announcements from phone makers, carriers, and everyone who make the wireless world a hot topic.

One such news announcement is from HTC, the makers of T-Mobile's Dash, MDA, and SDA as well as Cingular's 3125 and 8525 smartphones.

Today HTC goes beyond PDA/phones and enters the PC market with the Shift (formerly codenamed Shangri-La) and the U.S. version of the Advantage.

The Shift

Although HTC kept the lid on many of the Shift's tech specs, it did provide a few details to whet our appetite. It carries a 7-inch, 800-by-480 resolution touchscreen, 1GB of RAM, a fingerprint reader, a 1.2-megapixel digital camera on the left side of the screen(most likely for video conferencing and self portraits) a SecureDigital memory card slot,a 30GB hard drive, and Windows Vista Business Edition. It also offers several connectivity options: Wi-Fi, tri-band UMTS/HSDPA, and GPRS/EDGE for data; quad-band GSM for phone calls; and Bluetooth 2.0 for headsets. It uses Windows Media Player 11 to play music and videos.

Design-wise, the Shift is a cross between an Ultra Mobile PC and an ultraportable notebook. It's compact and a nice alternative to my 6-pound notebook. Based on a hands-on demo last week, the keyboard keys were tightly packed yet worked better than the keys on the Sony Vaio UX series notebooks.

HTC says the Shift will be available in the U.S. and in Europe in the third quarter of 2007. Here's what it looks like:

B_HTC Shift.jpg

The Advantage

We first saw it at the 3GSM conference back in February. It looks similar to a UMPC on the outside but works like a smartphone inside. It has a QWERTY kieyboard that's magnetically attached to the other half of the device. This allows users to remove the keyboard when not in use. It has a 5-inch touchscreen, 8GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, 256MB of ROM, a miniSD card slot, and a standard 3.5-millimeter audio jack. Here's a photo:

B_HTC Advantage.jpg

Under the hood, the Advantage is running the Windows Mobile 6 platform with support for standard Office apps, including Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Users can create and edit files using these apps. For data connection, it works on UMTS, HSDPA, GPRS/EDGE, and Wi-Fi networks. For voice calls, it uses quad-band GSM, which means it supports international roaming. It even packs GPS for navigation purposes. The HTC Advantage will be available through Amazon.com and other retailers this summer.

For more CTIA show coverage, go to PC World's Cell Phones and PDAs Info Center.

Comments

Now this may just be an iPhone killer. Not some crap Samsung.

Skunky

March 30, 2007

6:06 AM PT