Qwerty Smartphones: Best Buys
Reg Hardware recommends...
Group Test Among the nine smartphones reviewed on the previous pages, there are no duds, and in fact the standard is generally very high. Whether you favour the BlackBerry, candybar style or like you have a keyboard that can be pulled out for occasional use and tucked away the rest of the time is a matter of personal preference, so neither approach has been given particular weight here.
Before checking out Reg Hardware's recommendations, here are all the handsets that made up this group test:
- Blackberry Bold 9700
- HTC Touch Pro 2
- LG InTouch Max GW620
- Motorola Milestone
- Nokia E72
- Nokia N97 Mini
- Palm Pre
- Samsung Omnia Pro
- Sony Ericsson Aspen
You may also want to check out Reg Hardware's Qwerty Smartphones Buyer's Guide.
Of the candybar handsets - the BlackBerry 9700, Nokia E72 and Sony Ericsson Aspen - the first two are great phones and worthy of Recommended awards.
The Palm Pre is an odd case, perhaps, since it's a slider, but unlike all the others of this type, it retains a portrait orientation when the keyboard is revealed.
The remainder - the HTC Touch Pro 2, LG GW620, Motorola Milestone, Nokia N97 Mini and Samsung Omnia Pro - Motorola's Milestone and Samsung's Omnia are excellent handsets, attaining Recommended awards. But they're (just) pipped by the HTC Touch Pro 2, which hides away the aging Windows Mobile 6 platform behind a bright, fresh UI and, crucially for this group test, delivers a very fine, utterly usable Qwerty keyboard. Not new but still widely available, it's the Editor's Choice. ®
COMMENTS
Big gaps in the review
If you're using smartphones, there's a pretty good chance you want to use them for business - and that means being able to deal with Office documents and PDFs. No mention of that here. Email's probably the killer application for a keyboard smartphone...how much discussion of that in the article? Not a lot. How about the web browser? Any good? Dunno, I'll have to find out elsewhere.
In short, all we're offered is an opinion on the keyboard, maybe a few words about the screen, and a fleeting mention of unusual features. Abso-fraggin'-lutely nothing comparing smartphone features. Could I use this article as a basis to choose my next smartphone? Not a chance.
Fail.
N900?
So where was the N900 with its full Linux, good camera, excellent touchscreen, accelerometer, AGPS, integrated messaging clients etc?
Interestingly enough...
The Touch Pro that you're so madly harping about wasnt included in this review, so it would seem to me that either you're retarded or you just simply picked a bad place to rant about HTC.
If its any consolation, from what heard about the Touch Pro, it was pretty bad. I think HTC realized that pretty quickly as the Touch Pro had a short production life.
I've owned several HTC phones, the Dash, the Wing, the Mogul, the Tilt and the TytN II, all of them were decent, but they all had their shortcomings. in owning and using those phones, it was easy to see HTC progressing and maturing as each new rendition was released. Yes they were improving but at the same time it looked like their engineers just didnt get it, then they released the Touch Pro 2. It's the closest any manufacturer has come to making the perfect phone. The only thing i dislike about it is HTC's bolt on interface, Touch Sense, i absolutely hate that thing, fortunately it can be turned off quite easily. the WM6.5 upgrade rounded the phone out nicely.
People have been bellowing about Windows Mobile for quite a while, and i just dont get it, its the most open platform on the market, you can make WM6.5 do anything you want it to, at least with the Touch Pro 2 anyway.
HTC - NO!
El Reg keeps raving about HTCs. It's like all those car journalists test-driving cool cars - they don't have to live with them.
I got an HTC Touch Pro last year - great reviews etc. At first, marvellous indeed. Till you discover that locking the screen drains the battery in 3-4 hours, that it crashes all the time, gets dog slow...
Oh yes it does a lot and you can have a lot of fun in the first week with it.
After that you have a brick.
And guess what. Mine has now DIED. Completely. It's not the even battery. It's the phone. My first EVER mobile phone to actually DIE. The other day it managed to start, and I swiftly put all the data I could salvage onto the memory card.
HTC? Good for journalists having a good try for a couple of weeks. Ownership? Never.
