Product Reviews

While Nokia's N95 is a powerful but compact smartphone, HTC's Advantage X7500 PDA smartphone is more like a compact notebook. Most of the size is due to its enormous 5in LCD with 640x480 resolution, which is four times as large as the 320x240 screens on most Windows Mobile 5 PDA smartphones. Unfortunately, the operating system doesn't support this resolution natively. Text and icons are interpolated to make them larger, and Windows Mobile's ClearType feature smoothes the resulting jagged edges. If you want the Advantage to run properly in 640x480, you'll need to install the free MvRTrueVGA program from www.jaml.com/MvRTrueVGA.

The Advantage is very well designed. You can use it as a touch-screen PDA, entering text with the onscreen virtual keyboard or using handwriting recognition. The Advantage also comes with an attachable QWERTY keyboard. This is magnetic and incredibly easy to attach: if you bring it close to the Advantage's base it attaches itself in exactly the right place, and the operating system activates the keyboard automatically. It's slim, and the keys are well spaced so it's easy to avoid typing

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errors, but they have little travel, which makes it hard to tell when you've pressed one. The Delete key is also where you'd expect the Return key to be. Despite this, it's far quicker to use than the virtual keyboard.

The Advantage has a SIM card slot as well as wireless networking, so you can use a 3G or HSDPA data connection to download data at up to 1.8Mbit/s if your network and contract supports it. You can also use it to make phone calls, although its size makes this impractical and you really need to use a headset. Even so, it will never be a phone replacement. Setting up wireless is fairly easy using the Comms Manager, but it's not a patch on the N95's simple wireless setup wizard. As with all Windows Mobile devices, setting up a GPRS or 3G data connection is needlessly fiddly. The built-in Pocket Internet Explorer is a reasonable web browser, but it makes a mess of some web pages. You should install the Opera web browser for Windows Mobile to make the most of the Advantage's web capabilities.

The Advantage has an integrated GPS receiver and comes with TomTom's Navigator 6 software. We love TomTom's Navigator for Windows Mobile, Palm and standalone GPS systems, but it runs fairly slowly on the Advantage.

If you want to browse the web, send emails and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, HTC's Advantage may fit the bill, and it's far more compact than a notebook. However, it's expensive, chunky and doesn't run the latest version of Windows Mobile.

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