I really like phones that can do almost anything that computers can do and I know you do too. As processing power is still following Moore’s law nowadays telephones have the same or more computing power than PC’s from 10 years ago or less. That is quite a performance, but unfortunately the major downsize of today’s mobile devices is the small display and the small data input interface (keyboard, joystick, stylus or other). I really hope new technology will provide the solutions, but for now I come to admire the little tricks designers use in order to increase the display and the functionality of their products.

This is the case for the new HTC P4350 Quad band PDA phone. Even if at a first look it seems to be an ordinary PDA which has the touchscreen as the main input interface, you can see there is more to it. As people want to do more on their mobile devices the need for faster input lead to the integration of small QWERTY keyboards into mobile devices. For the vast majority of mobile devices, integrating a keyboard means decreasing the size of the display. However this didn’t happen for the P4350 as the designers incorporated a slide-out keyboard that elegantly appears from behind the 2.8″ color LCD with almost no impact on the design of this phone. Until true precise touchscreens will be available this is by far the most elegant and simple solution I have encountered for a PDA phone.

Leaving aside the design let’s focus on the hardware specifications of this device, as they often are the most important factor when searching for any product. I stated in the previous paragraph that the P4350 is quad band; that means that the phone is practically usable anywhere in the world being a perfect solution for those who travel a lot as it also supports GPRS/EDGE data transfer. But wait, the connectivity doesn’t stop here and WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and USB (miniUSB port) are also included.

Regarding the multimedia capabilities of this device I would like to mention the 2 MP digital camera for taking pictures or recording videos, and the playback part (audio, video, pictures) covered by specific applications of the Windows Mobile V5.0 operating system.

The processor behind this phone is a 200 MHz one from Texas Instrument and it is accompanied by 128 MB of ROM and 64 MB DDR SDRAM. With an expansion slot you can add more storage space using the supported microSD memory cards than can provide up to 2 GB of storage for your music,videos or your personal documents.

Filed under Mobile phones, Portable Media, Wireless