Finally a Windows Mobile handset I’d actually buy

I popped by the HTC stand yesterday and had a browse around. I’m normally hugely pained by HTC — brilliant devices completely hampered by Windows Mobile. Admittedly v6.1 of the OS is an improvement — but it’s still fundamentally annoying. I can’t stand the screen build-out and the fact that it simply can’t handle doing more than two things at once.

I had a browse about the stand admiring the various Touch devices. Super engineering. I had a play with a few. I dragged my fingers across the interfaces and found them jerky and supremely annoying. If you switch EVERYTHING off on the handset and let the OS catch up, and if you do a proper flick of your finger so that the crippled UI can detect and process it properly, you MIGHT be lucky to get the UI to perform without having to repeat the flicks and without jerky animation. I don’t know why Microsoft can’t make it work as reliably as an iPhone touch screen.

All this thought went out the window when I caught up with the S743. It’s like a proper ‘phone’ with your normal mobile keys at the bottom — but with the now familiar HTC fold-out keyboard.

Have a look:

It’s quite thick:

But that’s because it’s hiding a nicely formed keyboard:

I was very taken with it — a normal handset, not tooooo big, but with a nice chunky decent and usable keyboard.

Using the device, the smaller screen seemed to make it a lot more reliable in terms of use — it’s not a touch screen, so you’re not having to rely on the hugely limited Windows Mobile OS to understand what you want to do.

It’s got some rather nifty features too. 3.2 megapixel camera, WiFi, HSDPA… Finally an HTC Windows Mobile handset I’d take a look at. Shocking.

Original post by Ewan and software by Elliott Back