Kit reviews: HTC Shift, BlackBerry Bold and more

How work friendly are the latest innovations in the micro-PC world? The Gazette puts them to the test and weighs up their pros and cons.

The benchmark against which all small devices must be judged is usability. Anything else is gadget fetishism or mere room decoration.

This is true across the range, from normal laptops down to what the industry calls ‘ultra-portables’ and further, down to HTC’s Advantage, which is essentially a very large Windows mobile phone with a magnetic keyboard. Further down still there is the TyTN, a phone with a slide-out tiny keyboard.

For lawyers, real usability means being able to type on these gadgets and actually read things on the screen. We should not have to pack jewellers' spectacles in our luggage. Using mobile phones, such as the TyTN, to work on is a pain. The keyboard just isn’t big enough and the screen is just too small. Though we like the TyTN, it is still a phone with a clever trick.

At another tangent to this micro-PC scale is the tablet-based ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) format. This is an A5-format, book-width box with Windows and pen-based input methods. UMPCs stink – yes, stink – because they were always aimed not at real work but at consumer use (watching DVDs, ‘browsing’ the web, looking at YouTube and so on).

The giveaway for this is very plain: they don't have a keyboard. Hey, they don't even have DVD drives, but not having a keyboard should rule them out of all work-IT relationships.

HTC Shift

So HTC’s Shift (pictured above) is, bizarrely, not that bad. Though it is neither a UMPC nor a laptop, it delivers on the advantages of both (with a few caveats). To live in two worlds, between phone and laptop, it has two operating systems. Or rather, it has a big one and a small one. It has Vista for ‘real’ use and SnapVUE, a version of Windows Mobile, which is accessed when Vista is off and allows you to check email, calendar, the weather, the time, and so on. It has strengths and weaknesses, however.

First, the downsides: it runs Vista, and not that fast – its processor and memory are well below the levels desktop users would want. The Shift’s keyboard keys are woefully small, far too tiny to be used efficiently by any more than a hunt-and-peck artist. You cannot use WiFi without turning the whole Vista beast on – if you just quickly want to use SnapVUE, you need to use the phone to get internet. This should be rectified. And SnapVUE has no browser. The battery life is also pretty shoddy, no better than a second-rate laptop and, if you are using the 3G module, you had better be near the radio mast or the battery will fail faster than an investment bank on Wall Street.

On the upside, it is smaller than an A5 sheet of paper, thinner than a MacBook at just under an inch, and packs full-strength Windows. It has a 30GB hard drive, a USB port and a VGA video port. And it really can be a full laptop replacement, if you pack a keyboard and mouse. Before you grumble that ‘it’s not a replacement then is it!’, hold on a moment. Pack a USB mouse, a cut-down Bluetooth keyboard (or even a full-size one) and the Shift and the rest of the package is nowhere near as cumbersome as a laptop, and a lot more modular.

The Gazette recently saw a fold-up Bluetooth keyboard for just £70 by Freedom Input (pictured opposite, top) which would go perfectly with the Shift. Want to edit a document? Get your keyboard and mouse out and off you go. Want to just check and write some emails and read documents? Just use the Shift on its own – the keyboard and touchpad/screen are fine for that. It really is a jack-of-all-trades, and one that is genuinely useful.

All we want now is WiFi any time we want, maybe GPS, a better keyboard and voila – HTC will have hit the sweet spot. It’s not great, but it’s a lot better and more useful than one might think.

3G dongle

Mobile telco 3 lent us two USB 3G modems, so we handed them out to a few lawyers to play with. Result? Instant love from one City lawyer, who found the speeds great and the software and dongle ‘really easy to use’, and a qualified thumbs up from Gazette guinea pig, the technology lawyer and arbitrator Richard Stephens, who already owns one.

‘My deal is an 18-month contract allowing me a maximum 1GB download per month,’ says Stephens. ‘However, be aware that the dongle does not in all cases come free – I think I had to pay something like £45 for the device itself.

‘I saw from 3’s website that they offered excellent coverage in my area of London with availability of the full 3G experience. The first disappointment was that, in practice, I was limited to GPRS speeds [think back to the days of dial-up modems]. One of the problems of network coverage maps is that they are not guaranteed to show coverage in detail. The lesson is to test the device at the location where you intend to use it – there is a limited window in which you can return the device for a refund if you are not satisfied.

‘Using the thing on the move is a different experience. Again, different operators have different coverage, so check the various providers’ websites to see if your meanderings will take you out of good coverage. My own experience is pretty good – although download speeds are still far short of what I would expect of broadband, other than in areas of superb coverage, such as in the City of London.

‘Another thing to be aware of is roaming charges. I took mine to Paris for the weekend and did some limited downloading of emails and attachments, but my next bill was double the normal amount.

‘So, my view is it’s a mixed bag. And you should really ask yourself if you really need one given the ubiquity of WiFi hotspots these days. A nice “to have”, I should say.’ Units are, now, generally free, though roaming can still be pricey.

BlackBerry Bold

Research In Motion’s (RIM) latest BlackBerry is, if you believe the tech news services, its retort to the new 3G iPhone. It is, (almost) for the first time for BlackBerry, a 3G device – possibly the biggest single development it could make right now apart from going touch-screen, which is widely rumoured.

There are, however, no major updates to speak of apart from that. The Bold closely resembles the 8800 series devices in size and heft (the Bold is in fact a 9000 series), though it is slightly lighter. The screen is significantly better than the 8800s at half-VGA (480x320) resolution, and looks it. It is also slightly wider. There is also more memory on-board and RIM has, finally, moved the microSD memory slot to the side of the device.

The audio socket is also ‘normal’ headphone size, and RIM is keen to shout about the Bold’s multimedia capabilities. No one in their right mind would surely wish to watch movies on the Bold, but there is now room to put a few episodes of your favourite series on it. The keyboard is also much better than the 8800 and almost as good as the Curve.

The Bold is an attempt at a status statement, with a ‘leather-like’ back, which conjures horrible images of 1970s cars but in fact makes it very easy to hold, and a wraparound chrome frame. It is, strangely, quite pretty. Thrown in too is GPS, WiFi, 3G, a fresh theme, more usable document view/edit capability, a slightly better browser experience which zooms in and out, and a 2-megapixel camera. And it’s quad-band.

However, on a trip out to a rural part of Worcestershire, a fully charged Bold killed its battery overnight, which is not something you would want if sent out on an assignment. The 3G is switchable down to GPRS/EDGE, and any user going out of town or intending to be without a charger for a few days would be well advised to do this. In sum, the Bold is nice to look at, and, as usual, a pleasure to use. But a vital upgrade? Probably not.

Dane Elec Zpen

This seems crazy, but may not be. The Zpen (below) is a pen with an infrared (IR) transmitter in its nib, that communicates with a clip-on Flash memory-equipped receiver that mounts on top of sheets of paper or a notepad just like a clipboard clip. The clip ‘reads’ your writing as you jot down notes on paper and stores them in memory. Later you can download the notes and run them through an optical character recognition program, also provided. Rather impressively the program also transcribes Chinese ideograms, but cannot translate the language.

Character recognition was fairly good, as long as the words were not written in a hurry. It is possible too to ‘train’ the device further; though in the end it probably just trains you. Sadly, no one has yet made character translation for reporter’s shorthand or the whole Gazette would be using these by now. Dane Elec, we think, could make inroads with the Zpen in markets where there is lots of form-filling, especially local government, but the pen needs to be slightly less chunky and the software needs to be more seamless to use to make this a winner for us. However, any law firm seriously interested in going as paperless as possible, or one that does a lot of form-filling, might want to take a look.