The Htc Shift review
Posted on April 29, 2008
Filed Under HTC, Reviews, Windows Mobile, umpc
The Htc Shift, does it have the Wow factor? Read on to find out.
Htc has a long standing of making solid devices, but this is a new area for them to be in, the Umpc world. What is a Umpc, a ultra mobile pc. There are a few players in the field, notable ones are Oqo, and Samsung. There are other, but from a consumer view, these seem the most visible. Now what is it?
Think in terms of a small tablet pc running full windows. In this case, Vista, but I have seen other run Linux, Windows Xp and Vista, oh and the hacked OSX on X86 as well.
Now Htc did a spin on the whole Umpc take and the Shift is running a scaled back version of the Pocket pc os side by side with Vista.
Let take a look at the hardware first.
GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100
Dimensions 207 x 129 x 25 mm
Display Type TFT touchscreen, 16M colors
Size 800 x 480 pixels (Wide-VGA), 7 inches
3G HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0
Fingerprint recognition
A few notable items. There is built in 3g for the US with UMTS. But take note there is no phone. Not hands free or wired. There is also no Gps. Not that you would hold the Shift up to your face, but a speaker phone or a bluetooth headset would work. I have heard of a software hack to get the phone part working. Check in with [ Overseas Electronics ] to see if they can help
So, whats make the Shift so different then other UMPC products? Lets take a look.
The Shift is unique because of its slide out keyboard. The keyboard itself is very good, and almost feels full size, even though its pretty small.
The keyboard slides out and the screen tilts up, so you able to place the Shift on a table while typing.
The mouse is a touch pad on the side of the right side of the screen. It takes some practice to use this, since it up the screen portion of the Shift.
With a button press the Shift shift to what HTC calls SnapVue. This is scaled back Pocket Pc interface. In SnapVue, you can check your email, calender, and check the weather. Looks like a cool idea on paper, but SnapVue is extremely crippled.
Battey run times are very good in SnapVue, for obvious reasons. The run time in Vista, is poor, way less then 2 hours, if you don’t tweak VIsta out of the box. I doubt HTC will release a extended battery, but maybe a third party will come out with one. RIght now, thats the Shifts biggest weak point.
So, to sum it up. The Shift is a remarkable piece of hardware. At times I was using it, I felt that HTC said, can we do this, and they managed to pull it off. I felt that not a whole lot of market research was done to understand how and what users what in a mobile pc. Now, that may be just the fuzzy UMPC market as well.
A really cool device with some potential, perhaps running XP, just because Vista is such a horrible performer on lower scale devices.
Thanks to [ Overseas Electronics ] for getting me the HTC Shift.
