Powered by Microsoft Smartphone 2003, this moble combines style with a great set of features, including Outlook synchronisation, Bluetooth and an expansion slot for SD/MMC media.

Editor's note: O2 provided ZDNet Australia with a test model of the Xphone. The features on the mobile may be revised before it is released in Australia.

Taiwanese company, High Tech Computer (HTC), manufactures the O2-branded Xphone and at its heart is a Texas Instruments OMAP 710 processor that powers the Microsoft Smartphone 2003 operating system. It looks very similar to the Qtek 7070, which is also manufactured by HTC.

If you're looking for a smart phone, be prepared to sift through some fairly hefty handsets. The O2 Xphone is a supports tri-band GSM/GPRS and it is quite large for a mobile phone, measuring 120.4mm x 50.1mm x 24.4mm. It's a little on the heavy side too, as can expected with a phone this size, weighing 130g.

The transflective, thin-film transistor (TFT) screen is exceptionally responsive and looks remarkable displaying 16-bit (65,536) colours. Being 43mm long and 35mm wide, it takes up a very large section of the face of the phone and can display 176 x 220 pixels. Pictures appear crisp and there is little to no degradation in readability of the screen under strong light. Niceties like this make the Xphone stand out from many colour-screened phones we've seen, especially from the dullness that stigmatises mobiles hanging on to passive matrix displays.

Storage on the Xphone is generous; with 64MB flash memory and 32 MB SDRAM available. There is an SD/MMC expansion slot on the side of the mobile that supports Smart Digital Input/Output (SDIO) peripherals, so you can used the Xphone as a wireless modem by connecting it to a notebook via USB or infrared.

Windows Media Player is installed for watching MPEG4 (AVI) and Windows Media videos or for listening to MP3/WMA music files.

Messaging on the phone comes in a variety of flavours, including SMS, MMS and instant messaging (MSN messenger comes pre-installed). We found text input a little frustrating as the Xphone would not remember our previous setting (eg. If we had it set to T9 it would revert to numerical input). Also, we could not find a way to add words to the dictionary. These functions may be supported when the phone is released but during our review period no user guide or documentation for the handset was available.

Internet Explorer is included for Web browsing but we find the speed of GPRS just doesn't cut it for most sites. However, there are many sites out there designed for mobile devices and to see IE on a phone is impressive.

The usual array of keys can found on the Xphone including two soft keys at the top, and all have a metallic finish. There is a Home key to assist navigation and a Back key, which acts as backspace when typing messages and the back button when traversing menus or in Internet Explorer.

A five-way joystick is located directly under the screen and like many other mobiles with joysticks we found it is prone to slipping when you press it to select an item. The power button is on the side of the mobile above the volume keys and the camera shortcut key.

The XPhone supports English and traditional Chinese characters and on our prototype model, some of the property pages (such as available memory) appeared in Chinese text.

The camera on the Xphone takes still pictures in three resolutions from 160 x 120 pixels up to 640 x 480 pixels. We found that the photos taken at the highest resolution setting turned out slightly blurred (but still acceptable given that it's a phone camera). The camera can also record video with audio and we found it easy to swap between the two capture modes and to compose an MMS with the resulting file.

We found menu structure a little slow to traverse, as it is a simple list of nine items per page as apposed an icon-based interface like the one on the Sony Ericsson Z600. To speed things up, we realised the corresponding function numbers can be pressed as shortcuts instead of scrolling through the list.

Outlook synchronisation is supported through Microsoft's ActiveSync software. You can easily synchronise data such as e-mail and calendar entries between your Xphone and your PC by attaching a USB cable to the bottom of the device.

The Smartphone OS desktop is informative and reminds us of a PDA desktop. It shows recently used icons at the top as well as other information such as network, date and time, unread SMS/ActiveSync, and current profile. You can personalise the wallpaper with a photo you've taken or downloaded.

To call a phone number you can--obviously--just type the number into the phone. But the clever thing with the Xphone is when you begin to type the numbers the handset will try to auto-complete it with stored contacts or recently dialled numbers (like the way an Internet browser tries to match a recently typed URL). The most impressive aspect being that the phone also assumes you might be typing the letters in a contact's name and will suggest matching names as well as numbers.

Ringtones supported on the Xphone's polyphonic speaker are WAV, WMA and MIDI files, but we were unable to assign our own ringtones we added to the My Sounds folder on the phone.

02 states the battery life for standby is up to 90 hours, and in our tests the mobile lasted between two to three days before needing a charge.

This is certainly an interesting release from O2 -- we've only seen the Xda (a pda/phone hybrid) from them so far. For people after a more PDA focused device it might be worth your while to wait for the release of the O2 Xda II.

O2 Xphone
Company: O2
Price: AU$799
Distributors: Tech Pacific and BrightPoint

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