Pocket PC Phones a plenty...

Geek from the street.... BKK style.

Having lived in Hong Kong, one of the most saturated mobile phone countries on the planet, over the last three years I was wondering what living in Bangkok was going to be like when it came to mobile phone craziness. For the most part I have been pleasantly surprised to see that Bangkok has the goods. Hong Kong being one of the major cities to roll out 3G for the masses was beginning to experience a lack of interest in what I call smart phones or PDA phones. Why you ask - cause the 3G voice prices were amazingly cheap and the handsets were subsidized. Plus all the operators were putting on the big 3G content push - in Asia this means girls, games and gambling. Well Bangkok is not Hong Kong because GSM is king, people love to buy/sell/trade handsets and as of late there are a lot of Smart Phones suddenly available.

There are two main places to check out phones and PDAs in Bangkok. One is Pantip Plaza and the other is Fortune Tower IT Mall. Pantip is bigger but has everything electronic and takes some dickering for a good price plus you get hassled by all the pirate CD, Video, VCD and MP3 vendors. Although for computer stuff this is the place to go. Fortune Tower is a little more focused on phones and of course tends to carry the latest in PDA Phones. My friend and I have been cruising over there the last few weeks to see what the latest is in Pocket PC phones. A quick rundown.

The last few weeks each of the stores has been battling for promoting either the new HP iPAQ 6515 Pocket PC Phone or the Lenovo ET 960 Pocket PC Phone. I am not able to get test models and I am not interested in either phone so I can only give you my impressions of the phones based on playing with them in the store. Based on these two phones I have no intention of trading in my Treo 650 anytime soon. But read on since the new Benq P50 is out. From what I can tell all these phones are running Microsoft Mobile Windows second edition.

The HP phone has been expected around these parts for a while and since the iPAQs are quite popular in Asia so some people I know haven been putting off buying a new phone until they see the new HP.  Let me say that I think this phone looks like it was designed by someone who use to work for Agilent building test and measurement devices. The phone just looks a little clinical - not something I wanted to have in my pocket. The features are there for the most part and HP has certainly come a long way but they just did not go far enough with this phone. First off it is just a crime that this phone is the size it is but without wifi. Kills me. The screen is slick and the keyboard feels good but you get a sense that there is not enough juice in the phone - it just feels sluggish. Including the Mini SD slot and the SD slot is super smart and allows one to use the SD slot for a wifi card and the Mini slot for memory but of course this is not optimal. Anyway - once I came to the conclusion that the phone did not have wifi and just felt too big I really did not dig further. Oh yeah - everyone seems to chat up the GPS capability of the phone and most vendors in Thailand are bundling the phone with mapping software for Bangkok and some other cities in Thailand. Yes this is way cool but jsut not enough to make up for the lack of wifi.

Yes the Lenovo phone is winning design awards and it is one sexy beast but sex appeal is not enough when one can only imagine that dropping the phone in a hurried rush while boarding the SkyTrain in Bangkok will spell certain disaster. It just looks fragile. Across Asia most people are comfortable with the Lenovo brand but when it comes to mobile phones only people in China are used to Lenovo. This is the first Lenovo phone I have seen outside of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Clearly this is the new IBM/Lenovo pushing their way outside the confines of China. I agree with the strategy but I am not sure this device will help that cause. I only bring this up because for the most part when you read about this phone it comes with the verbiage that this is a China only phone which is clearly not true. I did not play with the Lenovo very much because it did not feel like it could take day to day usage without falling apart. For sure you would want to keep this phone in a case which I never do with my Treo. Some of the buttons are even located on the beautiful rounded corners and they just look like that would not survive a fall. The phone is full of features but it is also lacking wifi and it also has a nubbin. The external antenna that some phones like the Treo cannot seem to engineer out. I have learned to deal with it but I don't like it. I will move on from the Lenovo because as one of the shop owners was telling me - everyone was waiting for the Benq P50 and they all felt it would be instantly more popular than either the HP or the Lenovo.

Cruising through Fortune Tower today was an eye opener. Lenovo banners were all but gone and HP was still alive in some of the big iPAQ shops but everywhere else Benq had taken over. It was astonishing. I must say that after playing with the P50 I was for the first time starting to feel like my Treo 650 was getting old. It was not anyone one thing but it was a combination of the better camera, the longer screen, the absence of the nubbin, the wifi and the form factor. Benq had really pulled it together for the first time out. Let me run down some specs:

Audio recorder and activation button
Speakerphone
1.3 megapixel camera with digital zoom and camcorder
Speech command compatible with activation button
5 way nav key and Touch Screen
Benq version of skype
Wifi
SD card - caveat. The slot is SD but the SD card is really a holder for a mini SD card. Not sure I get this but I guess it means you can use SD or miniSD but not at the same time.
Bluetooth
Storage slot for second SIM card - clearly this came from someone in China since roaming countries is not cheap so everyone has 2 or more SIM cards.

Guts:
Intel pxaRXx with wmmx
91 mhz
64 MB ROM/RAM

Software:
Build date for system is 6-21-05
SW ver 1.05
HW ver 1.00
Windows Mobile Second Edition ver 4.21.1088

The specs appear to be cutting edge in the Pocket PC Phone group and I have to say that with the wifi, the keyboard, the longer screen, the SIM card storage slot and the thickness - this is the Pocket PC Phone to get. Since my friend picked up the phone today I hope to play with it a little more and let you know what the day to day usage is like. The wifi works great - that we confirmed.