HTC - S730

HTC's S730 updates an older device, the S710. It is a funny thing about hardware updates: when the original is groundbreaking, the update can sometimes appear a let-down. There is an analogy with bands who amaze and astound with their first album and then have trouble with the tricky second one.

Despite the fact that HTC is prolific in the field of Windows Mobile devices, this is the case with the S730.

The original S710 was a Windows Mobile Smartphone which, for the first time ever, had a slide-out keyboard. That might sound like a fairly simple piece of design, but it brought the possibility of speedy text entry to the Smartphone format, and as such made the S710 one of the smallest Windows Mobile devices with feasible mobile e-mail capability.

The S730 has the same design, but its slide-out keyboard is no longer an innovation. Add in the fact that there are several touch-screen Windows Mobile Professional devices with sliding keyboards that can rival the S730 for weight and overall size, and the new device becomes an even less alluring proposition.

At 150g there are Windows Mobile Professional (touch-screen) devices that weigh less, and if you are looking for a thin and pocketable smartphone then, at 101mm tall, 50mm wide and 17.7mm thick, this chunky device isn't it.

On the features side of things the S730 is quite advanced, though. It is quad-band GSM with 3G and HSDPA, and has a front-facing camera for video calls and a 2-megapixel unit on the back.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both present, the latter opening up the prospect of mobile e-mail and Web access from free wireless hotspots or your own network rather than on your tariff. There is 256MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM. Fresh out of the box my review sample reported a little over 120MB of free storage. A microSD card slot is on the right-hand edge of the casing so you can expand on what is built in.

This being a Windows Mobile 6.0 device, you can edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents (though not create them from scratch). The keyboard can come in handy here and mobile e-mail fans may find it particularly useful.

HTC has put its own Today screen onto the device, and this can be used to do things like view a weather report and forecast, get to your speed dials and set alarms quickly and easily. Anyone who has seen TouchFLO on an HTC Touch will recognise the look, although here, without a touch-screen, the feature set is more limited.(itreviews.co.uk)