HTC outs Q4 lineup in London: Shift, S730, P6500
Proving to me that the folks at HTC never sleep, they’ve got their fourth quarter lineup announcement direct from London. Three devices are on the docket: the HTC Shift UMPC which we’ve already seen and the S730 & P6500 Windows Mobile Smartphones. I don’t see any new information on the Shift but the two phones look interesting. The S730 appears to be a successor to the HTC S710, aka: the Vox with more memory, a bump in the processor from 201 MHz to 400 MHz, and HSDPA over the prior model’s EDGE. It still has the numeric keypad on the outside and a full QWERTY slider on the inside.
The P6500 (known as the Sedna?) looks like a PDA phone for the enterprise; maybe even more so for warehouses and logistics business. It’s chock full o’ features: GPS, HDSPA, 3-megapixel camera with barcode & fingerprint scanning capabilities, and two external SD card slots. Let’s see if this one shows up in Jack Bauer’s hands next season.
I’m interested in the Shift – my 6lb tablet pc is a bit heavy to carry around on a daily basis but I’m a bit concerned with it’s tablet functionality – does it work like a tablet PC or PDAs, or both? I’m concerned that it will pick up your palm when using the stylus unless there was a way to turn off “finger usage” but allow “stlyus usage”. Also, does it have touch sensitivity?
Mark, the Shift is a touchscreen-based UMPC and doesn’t have an active digitizer. You would likely have vectoring issues much the same as any touchscreen-only UMPC available today. Since it runs on Vista or XP, it’s much more akin to a Tablet PC / UMPC than a PDA. HTC does have some Windows Mobile / Vista SideShow functionality in it for instant access to some PIM information however.
There is some confusion over whether this is a GSM or CDMA phone. I suspect that the P6500 is CDMA and the P6550 will be the GSM variant.