The new Palm Pro
A raft of smartphones are due to be unleashed in the weeks before Christmas, and Palm’s latest is just one of them. But unlike, say, the Sony Ericsson Xperia or the HTC Diamond Touch, the Palm Pro doesn’t have a proprietary interface and flashy functions bolted on top: it’s a vanilla Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone, selling unlocked for £399, and on contract with Vodafone and O2. This is a good thing. My experience with third-party GUIs is that they tend to add a layer of complexity, freeze up and crash. And while it has steered clear of adding prettiness to the OS, Palm has finally got with the design vibe and come up with a handset that looks a lot better than some of its previous efforts. The Pro is a shiny black handset with elegant curves at the sides and corners, which means it fits comfortably in the, er, palm. Windows Mobile 6.1 is a big improvement on version 6.0, and the straightforward implementation of it here is easy to navigate. Improvements included threaded texts and a better Today screen. Bundled with the OS are Office Mobile apps (Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint) as well as Google Maps (which integrates with the GPS), a couple of games, the unloveable Internet Explorer and a pocket version of Windows Media Player. And it also supports Microsoft Exchange, which is easy to set up. Hardware-wise, this Palm has a touchscreen, which compared to some other devices is a bit small, but bright and responsive; Wi-Fi, so that you can hop on to a hotspot and save downloading data via 3G/HSDPA/Edge; and a physical keyboard. The latter has a slightly odd jelly-like feel and it’s hard to work up much speed on it, and the keys are a little close together. However, double-thumb input on this is a lot better than on most touchscreens. Battery life is what you’d expect on a smartphone — that is, you’ll need to charge it once a day — and you can add up to 32GB of storage via a micro SDHC card. The camera is below average by today’s standards at just 2MP, but on the upside is quickly accessed via a button on the side of the device. The buttons are probably the most thoughtful thing about this phone: the red button returns you quickly to the Today screen as well as both locking and waking up the screen, while a touch of the center button unlocks it. Wi-Fi is switched on and off via another button on the side. Most thoughtful is the switch on the top that toggles silent mode. Not very glamorous, but nicely implemented. And that’s the theme of this phone. There are flashier handsets, but this one is straightforward, responsive and thoughtfully implemented.
Archos 5 Media Tablet
“Internet tablet” slips so easily off the marketing keyboard, doesn’t it? But in the case of the Archos 5 Media Tablet, it actually is true. It’s got Wi-Fi. It’s got a huge hard drive (60GB for £269 or a mind-numbing 250GB for £349). It’s got a pleasingly solid rounded metal case. And the clarity of the 5-inch (12.5-cm) screen is stunning. It’s only 800x600, but has 16m colors. Pictures in video files are far better than an iPhone, with no motion blur and plenty of contrast. And it’s got a touchscreen as well. Thus, it’s a competitor to Apple’s iPod Touch; in fact, rather more prolific, since it will play music (MP3, AAC or WMA) or videos (AVI, MP4, WMV) or display photos stored elsewhere on a network, and do it well. Plus, the Wi-Fi link lets it play Internet radio stations, and Flash-based games, if you download them from your computer or the web. There’s also a web browser, and e-mail (though it can’t handle HTML mail). You can actually use the touchscreen keyboard — Apple take note — which appears in both the portrait and landscape orientations. There’s a standard headphone output. There’s a USB output (so you can use it as a hard drive), and various attachments which you can use to connect (at great, proprietary expense) a digital TV tuner, GPS, a helmet-cam (eh??), FM tuner, 3G modem and a DVR “snap-on” so you can record from a TV. Among the drawbacks are that it’s not light. Sometimes it reacts too slowly, so you're left tapping the screen and thinking it’s crashed. The e-mail interface isn’t the best: you get a list view, which is surprisingly unhelpful. Still, it’s elegant, crisp, silent, and you’d never know unless you asked that it all runs on Linux. Battery life on a brand-new model was well over 12 hours. The product is great. But is it worth it? Sure, if you carry lots of content around with you, such as TV shows you’ve got in a DRM-free format, to watch on the move, or need to do e-mail and web browsing on the move.
