CTIA Fall 2008
* Video tour added Sept. 12.
Velocity made its debut at the big CTIA show this spring. Their two initial models are the 103 and 111, the latter sporting a QWERTY keyboard. The 103 will start shipping later this month overseas, and through US channels in October.
The 103 has some nifty tricks up its sleeve, like TV output via the 2.5mm jack (much the way Nokia does TV-output.) This lets you pull impressive feats of multimedia mastery such as watching saved TV shows from your home DVR on the TV in your hotel room, using the Velocity 103's 3G connection and Sling software as the gateway.
Velocity also introduced two new models here at the fall CTIA show: the 83 and the 301.
The 83 is designed to be the more affordable model. It sacrifices 3G and the nifty trackball to achieve its lower price tag.
It holds its own feature-wise, though. It packs in an accelerometer for auto-rotation, plus the very unique feature of two microSDHC memory card slots. One is under the battery, while the other is under the SIM card. The means neither is hot-swappable. That's annoying, but it's that kinds of sacrifice that keeps both the price and thickness down (it is quite thin.) Loaded up with two cards, each appears separately in the file manager, but Windows Mobile will automatically pull from both to display a unified file list for music and video.
The 83 also has GPS, and will come pre-loaded with navigation software in some markets. Velocity said that they hope to position it against standalone GPS units in many cases. Look for the model 83 to hit the market just in time for the holidays.
The other new model is the 301, which will anchor the new high end of Velocity's lineup when it debuts early next year.
The 301 has 3G and GPS just like the 103, while stepping up to a much larger display (800 x 480 pixels across a generous 3.5 inches.) It will also have both an accelerometer and an electronic compass, enabling pedestrian navigation with the correct software.
Velocity is not just about cranking out nice-looking Windows Mobile hardware, though. There's a significant unique software element to the company's devices as well.
Somewhat like HTC's TouchFlo 3D, there is a special home screen replacement that aims to provide a clean, simple, easy way to start any task. There's also a comprehensive update service.
The standby part of the home screen is location-aware. When you land in a new city, it will detect that, and automatically update the time zone and weather info.
A launcher bar at the bottom of the screen works from the home screen and can be summoned at any time with a touch gesture. Much like the Dock on Mac OS X, you can drag-and-drop to re-arrange icons, and it serves as a task manager, letting you quit running applications manually to free up memory.
Velocity has also put a lot of effort into its over-the-air automatic update service, which it calls VOTA. All Velocity phones include this service for free. It will automatically check the Velocity servers once a week for updates, then gives you the option to download specific updates. It will then bundle up the group of updates you chose on the fly, download them over the network, and install them all in one easy step.
Here is a video tour of the Velocity 103:
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