I'm excited about these new Pocket PC Phones, and am finally starting to get a handle on the confusing world of Windows Mobile phones. In my column last week, I gave some resources to help sort out the complexity of the various device names and cellular networks. This week I want to point you to a few more reviews of Pocket PC Phones and related resources.
The i-Mate K-Jam (GSM/GPRS)
Last week we noted the arrival of the HTC Universal, and pointed you to reviews of the version released by i-Mate (the JasJar). This week the hot new device I’m covering is the HTC Wizard, which i-Mate is calling the K-Jam.
This phone has Bluetooth and WiFi (802.11b/g) wireless capabilities, a 1.3 MP camera, a slide-out qwerty keyboard, stereo headphones, Windows Mobile 5.0, and quadband GSM/GPRS.
That last point is important. I received an e-mail from a reader last week lamenting that the HTC Universal isn’t supported by his local network. As explained by the thorough review on PocketNow , this device is much more friendly to the networks in North America. It also has EDGE , a technology, which gives high-speed data transfer over GPRS
networks.
Check out Club i-Mate for an at-a-glance overview of the specs. There’s a great blog for this device that has a lot of useful information on the Beyond the Tech
Web site.
Sprint PPC-6700
Reviews of the Sprint PPC-6700 Pocket PC Phone are starting to appear. Again, this device has a variety of names, and is called the HTC Apache by the manufacturer.
It has a qwerty keyboard, a camera, Wi-Fi, Windows Mobile 5.0, and CDMA/EVDO (which is a third-generation cellular telephone protocol that gives data speeds up to 2 Mbps when downloading content).
The review on the PC magazine web site says, “This is the best Windows Mobile PDA/phone we've seen, with a nearly ideal balance of size and power, though we have a few quibbles.”
The device gets two thumbs up at at Om Malik's Broadband Blog
More Phone Resources
Last week we noted how confusing the phone world is, with the variety of names and network protocols, and I gave a link to two helpful resources.
Yet another resource can be found on the Geek Zone . It’s an extremely useful directory of Windows Mobile phones, giving you specs for all the devices. You can sort it in a variety of ways — by distributor, by device type, or by manufacturer. So for example...