Mobile Phones

The Hiptop 2 from Telstra is a long awaited product that has finally arrived on Australian shores. It's essentially a re-labelled Sidekick II, an extremely popular device distributed in America by T-Mobile, but the Hiptop 2 is designed with a younger audience in mind. While the technology may be a little outdated, the flip-out screen is a nifty feature, and the full QWERTY keyboard makes messaging a breeze. If you can handle the chunky design, and want a distinctive phone to impress your friends, the Hiptop 2 may be right for you.

The most notable element of this phone is the design. It is rather chunky, measuring 133m x 66mm x 23mm and weighing 187g, but this allows for a large screen and the full QWERTY keyboard. When you first take the phone out of the box, it resembles a handheld games console, however, lifting the screen slightly causes it to snap around 180 degrees on a hinge, revealing the keyboard below. This is a funky little mechanism, and very addicitive to play with.

An almost identical model to the Touch Dual, HTC's Touch Dual 850 is a Telstra-exclusive release in Australia. Running on the 850MHz HSDPA band (hence its name), the Dual 850 uses a compact QWERTY keyboard instead of the Touch Dual's standard nine-key keypad.

After the original launch of it back in 2007, HTC sought improvement in the Touch Dual models, and they have greatly improved the TouchFLO interface. Although both models look very similar to the original Touch they are slightly thicker and longer than their predecessor thanks to the slide out keypad.

The Touch Dual 850 uses a slimmed down version of a QWERTY keyboard, instead of the regular Touch Dual's nine-key layout. The 20-key keypad loses the Internet Explorer, Messaging and Start menu buttons, but we feel that it's a much better proposition than a regular keypad. This is intended to be a business device and despite the buttons being small and flat, the presence of a QWERTY keyboard is a plus. There are keys for commonly used functions like space, delete and caps lock and the dictionary works quite well — simply use the comfortable five-way navigational pad to scroll through various words while typing.

The P527 is a Windows Mobile Professional smartphone that comes equipped with high end features like an auto-focus camera and GPS navigation. It also features one rather rare and practical feature for a touchscreen based Windows Mobile device: a traditional alphanumeric phone keypad.

Its brushed metal front face is beautifully accented by its silver keypad and joystick, and the gray soft-touch surface found on the back of the phone, which surrounds the elegantly designed auto-focus camera, is both practical and attractive. In fact, all of the surfaces of the P527 seem very practical in that they offer a good feel yet stay remarkable free of fingerprints.

It has a reasonable weight of 132g (4.7oz), and measures up at a very pocketable 114mm x 58mm x 16mm (4.5" x 2.3" x .6").

Core functions

The quad-band GSM/EDGE Asus P527 works remarkably well as a regular phone for a Windows Mobile Professional device, thanks in large part to its keypad. But the P527 also offers fine reception on the 1900MHz frequency band, and has good audio characteristics in general, including a very solid speakerphone function. The P527's battery also seems up to the task, managing a solid 7.5 hours of talk time, and surviving pretty well for a device that sports energy draining features like GPS.

Like all Windows Mobile smartphones, the P527 has an excellent contacts system that can store all sorts of useful bits of information. The addition of the keypad on the P527 makes accessing contacts a simple task, as users merely have to start entering a contact's name on the keypad to see a list of matching records. A space can even be added to allow for searching on both the first and last name at the same time. A speed dial number can be defined for a contact for easy one-press dialing, and the very powerful Voice Commander system can be used for speaker-independent voice dialing or for accessing any number of phone features.

Like the Verizon PC5220 card, the PC5750 slides into a single Type II PCMCIA card slot on a laptop or other computing device. Like Verizon's V640 ExpressCard and USB720 (nearly the same as the Sprint U720), the PC5750 can be used with Mac OS machines as well as Windows computers.

The PC5750 ships with an updated version of the Verizon VZAccess Manager application, which serves as the control panel for the PC5750. From the VZAccess Manager you can connect or disconnect the modem, send and receive text messages, launch applications, or review the usage log. If you choose the appropriate option when you are first installing the application, the VZAccess Manager can also manage your WiFi connections so that it can switch back and forth between the EV-DO Rev A network and WiFi access points without user intervention.

In terms of physical attributes, the Verizon PC5750 is fairly typical. The card weighs 51g (1.8oz), which is about 25% heavier than my older PC5220 card. It measures up at 116mm x 54mm x 13mm (4.6" x 2.1" x .5"), with the thick part of the card extending about 30mm beyond my Panasonic laptop's card slot. The PC5750 has a nice antenna on it that can be positioned in any of a number of different ways - no matter how you choose to hold your laptop, the antenna can be positioned in an upright stance. It also gently clicks into its resting place when not in use. A good design, it seems.

Palm Treo 750 has a compact design that the folks at Palm were really aggressive about. It stands short at 111mm x 59.3mm x 21.3mm, and weighs about 154g. For practical purposes, however, the phone is pretty bulky. You are going to have to get used to that bulge in your pocket.

The phone features a QWERTY keypad, which surprisingly doesn't take up a lot of space. Even though the keys are closely bunched together, the surface is well rounded, so you don't end up hitting the wrong keys. If you like to keep long nails, however, you may need to reconsider your fashion sense!

Just above the keypad you will find the start button, call and cancel keys, the five-way navigation pad and the open keys. The touchscreen displays only up to 65k (16-bit color) at a resolution of 240 x 240.

If there's one thing I appreciate about this phone, it's got to be the fact that you don't really need to use the touch feature all the time; least of all when you are messaging or taking notes. All the functions can be accessed from the keypad alone.

This Treo is equipped with a 300MHz Intel processor with 128MB flash memory, which makes the phone kind of sluggish for all that it has to offer.

Sadly, the kind of effort and strain it takes to run all those applications is too much for the existing processor to handle. To add to that, simple things like unlocking the phone seems to take an eternity, which is quite unacceptable.

Such niggles apart, the Treo 750 is feature-rich, and can be the perfect device to integrate your office needs. It offers dial by name and photo speed dialing directly from 'Today' (which is like the desktop on your computer) screen.