Mark Lawton's Generalist's Repository

I bought one of these from a friend, and wow, I am amazed to be honest for the £100 i paid, more-or-less, as new, in the box!

I set up all of my windows mobile apps-you can’t run those on an i-phone!

It has its own internal GPS which works OK once Tom-Tom was installed.

It also has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a USB interface.

I used to have a Dell Axim PDA, so this was like having it all in one device, along with a phone, and a 3.2 megapixel camera.

The camera is great, and the screen display is good as well,

The touch screen display once used to is very good,

All in all I am very impressed, and it is a small size.

Running the GPS in the car, it takes a minute or two to get a lock, but otherwise it was OK.

Internet explorer, the weather, YouTube, and the games were OK as well.

What I didn’t like on it were a very short battery life of 1-2 days with average use, and the speaker for the ring is a bit on the quiet side.

One other point is that you get 4GB of internal storage, but no card slot at all. Being honest, for everyday sensible use, GPS maps, a few good major apps, and a good selection of my favorite music tracks I am using 3.3GB, and I have maxed it out with what I use for all occasions.

If I delete most of the music, leaving a few favorites on, this comes down to about 1.8GB in use; so there is plenty of room for applications and data storage as far as I am concerned.

If you use it with a PC, and Activesync it, then you should never have a problem with space if you are not one who insists on having 1000 songs on there, but only listen to 50!

All in all for me it gets 8/10.

I have heard a firmware update does wonders to the battery life, the cellphone reception, and the “touchflo” screen driver software, although I have not tried it myself.

The picture shows the HTC Ignito, or Diamond, which are essentially the same ‘phone, but with the larger battery and rear case.

I could not use this phone with the extended battery mods, because my phone would not fit the original case, or the car holder for the GPS, although a bigger battery would give me extra operating time.

Using a car mount and a cigar lighter PSU though I had no problems with the GPS, and no roof antenna was required, unlike my Dell Axim X50 with CF GPS adaptor!

For the money and size I do regard this ‘phone as a potential “i-phone killer!” It is smaller than the i-phone, and does nearly as much for the money!

Alright, some windows apps are available for the i-phone,but the ones I use are not runable on the i-phone, so for me it is an ideal solution to the PDA replacement I need to have an “all in one solution!”

HTC are a force to be reckoned with, and with Windows Mobile 6.1 I am not complaining!

It is a great “all in one device”, and with a better battery life, and a better speaker would get 9 or even 10/10!

Have fun…

The spec is below.

HTC Ignito.

General 2G Network GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 2100
Announced 2008, August
Status Available. Released 2008, August
Size Dimensions 102 x 51 x 11.5 mm
Weight 110 g
Display Type TFT resistive touchscreen, 65K colors
Size 480 x 640 pixels, 2.8 inches
- TouchFLO 3D finger swipe navigation
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Touch-sensitive navigation controls
- Handwriting recognition
Sound Alert types Vibration; Downloadable polyphonic, MP3, WAV, WMA ringtones
Speakerphone Yes
Memory Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Internal 4 GB storage, 192 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM
Card slot No
Data GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, miniUSB
Camera Primary 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, autofocus
Video Yes, CIF@30fps
Secondary VGA videocall camera
Features OS Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
CPU Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 MHz processor
Messaging SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Radio Stereo FM radio with RDS
Games Yes, incl. motion-based + downloadable
Colors Black
GPS Yes, with A-GPS support
Java Yes, MIDP 2.0
- Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, PDF viewer)
- Voice memo
- MP3 player
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 900 mAh
Stand-by Up to 285 h
Talk time Up to 5 h 30 min

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