The Qtek7070 Smartphone can be viewed as the Optus' answer to the 3G and 3G-like offerings of the other mobile carriers. If you want to know the differences, you'll have to read our Australian review.Optus has shied away from the "walled garden" approach adopted by the other carriers, but since the telco has no plans to launch a 3G network at this stage it is worthwhile contrasting the Smartphone against the "next gen" offerings of the other carriers.
The Smartphone uses an interface based on Windows CE, which brings the main components of the Windows desktop to the mobile, including Internet Explorer, Outlook and Instant Messenger. During our evaluation period these applications worked quite well, but in their shrunken form it can take some getting used to. By the end of our evaluation, we still hadn't worked out exactly when the "go back" buttons would delete a character, close a menu or close an application.
The handset itself, which Microsoft and Optus have obtained directly from Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, is quite attractive with a large 65k colour TFT reflective display. It weighs 130g and measures 120x50x23 mm. Navigation is via a five-way joystick, which presents the usual problems of moving up or down when you're trying to select something, or vice versa.
Two softkeys are linked (on the main page) to "programs" and "call history", with the "answer call" and "end call" buttons below them. Aside from the normal keypad, the other buttons on the phone are a "go back" button and a "home" button, which takes you back to the opening page.
The power button and volume buttons lie on the side of the phone, along with a button attached to the video player. There is also a slot for an SD Card.
We had some issues with the Smartphone from a mobile messaging point of view. When typing an SMS we couldn't get the phone to use predictive text. The mobile has predictive text, and uses it in some other applications, but it wasn't obvious how to change the text format when writing an SMS.
Multimedia messaging didn't fare much better. We were subscribed to an Optus service that sent an MMS of the daily news, but couldn't manage to download the messages--you are first notified you have an MMS, then given the chance to download it. When we tried to download the MMS', we only got error messages--and once eight lines of text.
While its SMS and MMS capabilities are suspect, one area that we can't fault the Smartphone in is Web access. In this function we found the Optus Smartphone to be superior to every other phone we've tested. Navigation is done on a pared-down version of Internet Explorer, which makes for a fairly intuitive experience.
The mobile comes with some pre-programmed favourites, but you can add your own--enabling you to surf the entire Internet. Of course, unless the pages are specifically designed for mobiles, they can be massive, but the browser made a reasonably successful attempt to reformat most pages to fit the smaller phone screen. The only complaint we had was that we couldn't download anything from the 'net to the phone, such as a picture or file.
The data transfer rate on the Smartphone is impressive and pictures load quickly. If you don't want to pay through the nose when you access a particularly picture-heavy page, you can change the options to not show pictures, and also change security and privacy options such as cookies.
However, you're not left to find mobile-friendly Web sites entirely on your own. The pre-programmed favourites lead to some pretty nifty sites, such as Optus PDANet, which contains links to Web friendly pages.
The "Australian News" link provides access to the mobile-friendly Web pages of four Australian newspapers, while the "International News" section contains links to nine news sites, including Ananova, CNN and BBC. The site also contains links to a couple of search engines and the White Pages. There's also a link to the MSN Mobile site, which includes Hotmail, and Windowsmedia.com, which contains footage for mobiles.
The Smartphone also comes with a clip-on camera, which is reasonably effective but takes a bit of getting used to. The camera can take photos in four different sizes, and the 32 MB of onboard memory allows you to take and store a lot of images. You can store 322 images at 640x480 resolution, up to a whopping 2,577 images at 80x64. If that's not enough to satisfy your camera-snapping urges, you can upgrade the memory via any standard SD/MMC Card.
The camera also has a timer, set on one second, and the ability to adjust the flicker and brightness for images. Like most mobile cameras, you need to have a steady hand and good light to get a good image, but passable images are somewhat easier to get.
The camera also works as a video camera, with two different sizes--160x128 and 80x64 pixels. Up to four and a half minutes can be recorded in the lower resolution, and up to three and a half minutes at the higher resolution. If you move the camera fast it takes a while for the image to catch up, but apart from that it works well.
The other menu options (there are 21 of them) provide most of the basic functions you would expect from Windows, including Solitaire. As with Microsoft's Pocket PC PDAs, Activesync is provided for synchronise data with your desktop. The battery life is advertised as 3-5 hours of talk time and 60-80 hours of standby; as with many phones in this category the large screen chews through the power comparatively quickly.
Qtek 7070 Smartphone
Company: Optus
Price: AU$889
Distributor: Optus Stores
6%
2%
If you want to change it to do predictive text in an sms message, just hold the * key down for a few seconds and it will change to T9. (it could actually be the # key, cant remember which)