CTIA Fall 2005
On the Smartphone side, another interesting Windows Mobile device moving closer to release is the Samsung SGH-i300. This is the one with the 3GB hard drive inside.
Finally having a chance to hold it in hand, the i300 feels smaller than it looks under glass. It's a great size considering the hard drive and extensive feature list. There's almost nothing it doesn't have. It even has a microSD (TransFlash) memory card slot. (The competing Nokia N91 hard-drive phone lacks a memory card slot.)
The QVGA display is very impressive. It is small compared other recent Windows Mobile Smartphones, but Microsoft has made all of the fonts proportionally larger at QVGA resolution, so most of the text is no smaller than if the display were the standard 176 x 220. Everything is simply sharper and crisper with QVGA. Therefore the extra resolution is most useful for graphics, such as photos, maps, and games.
The potential best part of the i300 might not even be the hard drive, but the spinning scroll wheel / jog dial in the center. Borrowing a page from the original iPod, the central silver wheel spins to make it easy to scroll through long lists of songs.
That great and all, but the scroll wheel also works in regular Windows Mobile applications, potentially making it dramatically faster and easier to navigate the user interface (UI).
...unfortunately, this capability is horribly crippled. In the version we tried, and as far as we could tell, absolutely zero tweaking has been done to the UI to make it work well with the scroll wheel.
For example, the wheel makes it so easy to scroll through lists that it would just take a quick, intuitive flick of the thumb to find the application you wanted in a list as long as 50 items or more. But the main menu is still divided up into one-screen chunks, so you still have to press "more" to go to the next page. This has always been annoying with Windows Mobile, but with the scroll wheel, it's absolutely infuriating.
The same kind of mistake is made with the calendar application. In month view, you would expect the scroll wheel to scroll from one day to the next. But because it is merely linked to the up/down button functions, it only scrolls vertically. So if you're on Monday the 10th and you scroll the wheel one click, you'll go to Monday the 17th, instead of Tuesday the 11th, as you'd expect.
It's difficult to convey in words why this is such a major flaw, but take our word for it that - trying it in person - these issues are extremely obvious and frustrating.
Of course, what we tried was still a prototype, so it's possible Samsung will fix these issues before release. We hope that they do.
Review: T-Mobile MDA
Review: Kyocera Jet for Amp'd
CES 2006
CTIA 2005
Amp'd Gets Wings With First Phone
UTStarcom CDM-8945 / PN-230
Samsung SGH-i300
Kyocera KX12
