Since the spring of 2007 I have carried a HTC S710 Smart Phone with me everywhere I have gone. When I bought it, I was nervous about moving away from a touch screen based device (I had an iMate JamIn before) but I soon realised that the QWERTY keyboard more than made up for the lack of a touch screen and so over the last 20 months the phone has been used to the full extent of it’s capabilities, tethered to a corporate Exchange 2007 server with push email as I have travelled around Europe and North America.

Note taking, browsing, email, and even phone calls have all been in the palm of my hand with 100% reliability and pretty good performance. Indeed I have got to a point where these days, for 80% of meetings, my laptop now stays at home because the S710 does everything I need and just slips into my pocket.

But 20 months is by far the longest time I have kept the same phone and there are a whole range of new phones on the market this quarter trying to tempt me to upgrade and compared to them my little S710 is looking somewhat dated but just what is a worthy replacement?

So first things first, my phone is a business tool. It will get used all day every day and will suffer the usual day to day corporate use so needs to be well put together. As I use ALL the features of Exchange, I am limited to either Windows Mobile or Blackberry as no other platform yet has real Exchange sync functionality. Indeed the new iPhone which made a big deal about how it has ActiveSync built in is ready for the enterprise really is a joke when you try and use it in this way. Blackberry on the other hand is still unreliable and as a phone (rather than a messaging device) is actually rather poor.

So I have looked and looked and eventually came across the HTC Touch Pro device.

This has everything I need, plus a larger touch screen with the really nice Touch Flow GUI and is the same size as my S710.

It has a nice quick processor, built in GPS, 3G connectivity and a 3.2mp camera.

It also has the same slide out QWERTY keyboard as my S710

Indeed it can only be described as “fully loaded” but with a £500 price tag is a serious investment.

But then there was the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 which had everything the Touch Pro had (indeed it is even made for Sony by HTC) with the same processor and chip set, but then added a larger touch screen, metal body and an interesting GUI to compete with the Touch Flow GUI HTC have.

But as the reviews started to appear it soon became clear that the Xperia is less polished than the HTC.

If taking photos and listening to music are high on your list of things that you do with your phone then the Xperia appears to be the phone for you.

If you want a business tool then the Touch Pro seems to have it.

So the choice was almost made up for me when out of the blue, HTC announced the new S740

Now this phone is a direct replacement for the S730 which replaced the S710 (are we keeping up at the back?).

Under the skin it is pretty much the same as the Touch Pro but has no touch screen hence it runs Windows Mobile Standard and looses the Touch Flo GUI.

Now experience has shown me that the Windows Mobile Standard devices have been rock solid, ultra stable, use every day business tools whilst the touch screen devices have been more troublesome (maybe down to all the extra software people load onto them) and less stable. I was also aware that I had moved away from a touch screen a couple of years ago and not missed it.

But then I saw this picture:

Compared to the S710 it looks HUGE! Thinner yes but a lot lot taller.

So this made my mind up and I reached for my credit card and ordered a HTC Touch Pro.

Having set the thing up and cycled the battery a few times I set off for a full day out of the office catching the early train into London (see my previous blog post to see what I got up to).

So the phone performed OK and by the time I got home late in the evening, the battery was almost gone but I have made a number of calls, taken a load of photos, run push email, browsed the web over HSDPA and used the GPS on the train home. The GUI was nice to use and over all I was quite impressed.

But on the downside, the phone locked up once, rebooted once and then decided it didn’t have any GPS hardware for a while before it rebooted itself again. It also struggled hanging onto a signal and had a rattle in the earpiece.

So we returned this to Expansys and they shipped me another one. Unfortunately the replacement phone is also faulty, is a non UK model and was back in it’s box within 3 hours of being delivered (although it manage to reboot itself in that time).

Now originally my plan was to put this down to bad luck and get a 3rd Touch Pro but Expansys customer service got in the way and even now, 2 weeks later I am still waiting for them to pull their finger out and sort things out. What it does mean however is that I will now have to go to another retailer and buy a handset because I am no longer comfortable giving them large amounts of my cash.

But this delay has given me time to think and again it comes back to reliability.

Looking around the forums, daily reboots seem to be the norm (yet for some odd reason totally acceptable) on the Touch Pro. Sure I could load a cooked ROM onto it but on a £500 should I really have to? The Xperia however is just bigger and does not offer any more functionality and is also even more expensive than the Touch Pro.

And whist I had the Touch Pro, I have to admit that once I had set the pho
ne up, I never used the stylus so the whole touch screen thing is kind of a waste.

Which brings us back to the S740. Sure it looks long but only when compared to the S710 and is thinner. When you measure how long it really is, it’s not that big. It’s also a non touch screen Windows Mobile Standard device yet has the same processor as the Touch Pro and the Xperia. So the same power without a touch screen to drive. I would expect it to be rather quick. And finally, it is £140 cheaper than the Touch Pro which oddly right now is the cost of a Redfly mobile companion.

So I think my mind is made up but now I have to wait because in true HTC fashion, the shipping date has been delayed to the 4th of November so to keep me going I have loaded up Windows Mobile 6.1 onto my S710 so get used to the new OS.

Will I miss the touch screen? Probably not as I don’t have one now and for the brief period with the Touch Pro, it did not really change how I navigated the device. Will I miss the smaller screen (the S740 has a 2.4” screen, the Touch Pro has a 2.8” screen and the Xperia has a 3” screen)?

To be honest I would no more want to write a long email or document on a 3” screen than on a 2.4” screen so the only area I think I might notice the smaller screen is when web browsing and to be fair, these days, most sites render for the small screen anyway.

So once Expansys have got their act together with my faulty Touch Pro and the S740 is in stock (somewhere else) I will no doubt be posting my thoughts on this new phone up here although I won’t bore you with a 20 minute “unboxing” video