Qtek Pocket Pc

[Deanna]

Taiwanesespecialist HTC has become the undisputed champion of Windows Mobile devices. This company has produced smartphone after smartphone for most of the major networks in the world - including Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and O2.

But this is not any conventional flip - it uses a bang-up-to-date low-profile design, of the type popularised by the Motorola RAZR. With a maximum thickness of 19mm it can't quite out-slim the Motorola, but at 99g it is reassuringly lightweight.

As usual the STRTrk is expected to join the ownbrand ranges of several of the network operators and by third-party companies. We tested the version that's being distributed by HTC itself, via its Qtek brand. It can be found on sale SIM-free for around 300.

Although powered by the Windows Mobile operating system, the phone is not only contemporary in size, it also keeps up with fashion in terms of its buttons, providing external controls for use with the onboard media player. This is a version of Microsoft's ubiquitous Media Player, but unlike some phones with musical pretensions it can support a good range of different file types.

Using the phone as your pocket sound machine however is made slightly tricky by the fact that HTC has again hidden the memory card slot. It's easy to get files on and off a phone using a card, so it's good to make this hot-swappable and easily accessible.

In this way you can carry as many cards as you like to rival the storage capacity of an iPod. Here, however, the fiddly microSD cards have to be inserted not just under the battery cover, but beneath the SIM card. Not very convenient.

The phone has a useful full-colour external screen, which remains hidden away behind a dark circular window when not required. Pushed into action it not only provides you with an attractive clock, but also lists details of the tracks you are playing - and it can also be used as an alternative camera viewfinder.

Despite the three MP3 player buttons, the external controls are kept to a minimum and discreetly placed. Simplification of the design leads to one handling gripe: the phone uses a single multi-pin interface for charging, hardwiring to a PC's USB port, and for plugging in the supplied stereo earpieces.

You can't listen and charge, therefore - and you can't use a standard set of headphones. As this is one of the first handsets that will work with a stereo Bluetooth headset, this may not be a real issue.

The phone's operating system runs on a 195MHz processor with 64MB of RAM - perfectly adequate, but not particularly fast when it comes to some more demanding applications, and a specification that is the same as HTC was using in its Windows smartphones a couple of years back.

The sound quality from the MP3 player proves to be very good. The audio experience through the speakerphone is nothing to get excited about but at least the music is not distorted. Plug in the supplied headset and you get a very pleasing performance - good enough to let you get lost in the music.

However, as we are constantly reminded, pixels aren't everything. In practice, the QTek turns in a good set of prints, with good exposure, contrast and colour. There was a slight tendency to produce over-warm pictures, and for highlights to be very slightly burnt out but neither fault was serious.

It should be pointed out, however, that there is no close-up macro facility or flash. Whilst the latter is unlikely to be missed, the lack of macro means that you can't use the camera for detail shots or for snapped 'photocopies'.

The real attraction of this phone, however, is its email and web capabilities. You not only get the chance to keep tabs on your inbox when travelling, but a suite of Word, Powerpoint, Excel and PDF viewers mean that you can look at most of the attachments that are sent to you. There's also support for push email.

The Internet Explorer browser makes a good job of showing the pages, even though the screen is only a quarter of the size of a desktop VGA display. There are a number of display options, allowing you to see sections of the real page, or have it flowed into a single column for easy scrolling.

You can also zoom in and out with relative ease. We were very impressed with some more complex sites that could be competently handled - and particularly by its ability to correctly rend-up Java pop-up screens on one of our favourite surf-spots.

This is one of the few handsets that you can buy that allows you to take advantage of the power, flexibility and features of a decent smartphone - without having to be unduly weighed down. Chris George

We got our hands on the Qtek S200 at the start of March 2006, just after its release, and so far, we're pretty impressed. This is essentially an evolution on the o2 XDA form factor, combining a high-end mobile phone together with the power of the latest version of Windows Pocket PC operating system.

As a PDA, this device offers top-of-the-range functionality and connectivity... all the buzzwords are there: wireless connectivity with wi-fi and Bluetooth, support for USB and infrared connectivity, as well as being a quad-band data enabled mobile phone.

Size-wise, it's a lot less bulky than its predecessors - it's only slightly wider than a credit card, making it a nice comfy fit in the hand.

Connectivity: Smoothly integrated Wi-fi and Bluetooth using Windows Mobile's own software. At the bottom of the right-hand size, there's an infrared window, and on the bottom, a standard mini-USB connector (we're pleased to see that it uses a standard connector, whereas most smartphones have unique connectors to bump up accessory sales)

Camera: The Qtek S200 sports a 2 megapixel camera. The lens has a small switch to allow switching to macro-mode for close-up image taking. The camera software, photo, video, MMS video, Sport and Burst mode. There are various ambience settings and a digital zoom to play with, and some fairly basic options to allow cropping and rotating of images. From the media browser, you can view a slide show, or easily send an image to others. Photo quality is pretty impressive, although as with most devices in this class, it's let down by the lack of flash for those indoor shots.

Business apps: The standard Microsoft Windows Mobile set: Pocket Word, Pocket Outlook, Pocket Excel, plus Powerpoint Mobile. There's also ClearVue PDF for on-device PDF viewing, and Terminal Services for remote access to a desktop PC. Synchronisation to PC is achieved smoothly using Microsoft's ActiveSync v4.1

Telephony: As a phone, the S200 is more than capable, but there are a couple of oddities - firstly, if you haven't used a touch-screen to dial phone numbers, you'll be in for a gear change.. not a problem, just odd if you've got years of experience with dialling on a traditional mobile. Creating an SMS is a joy - the touch-keyboard or the handwriting recogniser makes creating texts a pleasure. As a phone, the S200 is 'ok' - usable, but slightly harder work than a more traditional phone. We also found the vibrate a bit extreme. When set to vibrate on an incoming text, it's not the discrete second buzz we're familiar with, but a desk-walking five seconds of power buzz. We're guessing that folk will be buying this phone for it's data and connectivity, and not as a slick pocketable mobile... and the telephony part of the product just scores an "ok" with us...

We like this device - as a one-box data connectivity tool, it's the biz - effortless surfing over Wi-fi, USB or GPRS depending on where you are. SD slot for adding loads of great Pocket PC apps, crisp touch-screen display, and eminently pocketable. It is loaded with a relatively slow processor, making for slightly jerky video playback, and prone to minor slowdowns when running thirsty apps - according to the manufacturers, the lower processor speed helps with getting an improved battery life, and that's more important to the target users who want to be able to go online and work on the move, rather than play games and watch videos.

Overall, as a connected PDA, this excels, and is the smallest and most feature-packed one-box solution we've found.

The Qtek S200 comes with a belt-clip case, power adapter, USB cable, set of stereo headphones, getting started guide, manual, a spare stylus, and two CDs of software. The discs include Microsoft ActiveSync 4.1, Microsoft Outlook 2002 and a GPRS monitor application and a collection of other applications.

To perform a soft-reset (if the device has locked), briefly insert the stylus or a paperclip into the reset hole on the bottom left of the S200.

If you want to hard-reset your Qtek S200, here's how. This will return your machine to factory defaults - losing all of your data.To format your S200, go to Start > Settings > 'System' tab and select "Clear Storage" - then follow the prompts.

If you come across Pocket PC software asking you to pick one of these three options, the one to go for is ARM. These options represent earlier days of Pocket PC development, where an application had to be compiled for a specific processor.

If you see software making this distinction, it indicates the software may have been complied a few years ago, and therefore may not run on the latest machines. If in doubt, check with the software author

This is an interesting one. We've been looking for the technical support page for the Qtek S200, so that we could find a ROM update for our device, and have hit an interesting problem. First, we went to Qtek's site and followed the Support link. We were asked to type in the IMEI number for our handset, which we did - this told us that need to get support from www.teleservice.com - We went there, and found nothing related to Qtek. We sent Teleservice's head office an email, only to be told that they didn't support the Qtek, and couldn't provide a contact address at Qtek.

We can't find any contact details on the Qtek website, so we can't ask them directly.

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