Aye … Hugo does get boy-in-toystore excited, but that’s more his style and to some, his appeal. ;) After a few reviews though, one does start to wonder if his reviews does give a balanced view, ie the pros and cons. Granted, he does on occassion, point out certain flaws etc.

About HTC Shift itself, I do find the sideshow application with WM6 strangely appealling and revolting at the same time. Appealling because of the long 20 hours (did I hear right?) run time with sideshow running alone. I really miss the ridiculously long batt life of those old Palms that run on AA batts, so having sideshow with 20hrs … *wow*. Add to the shared access of the hdd without booting to Windows, means gigabytes of data access! The best part is that you don’t need to sync up anymore, since you are accessing the same storage … right?

The horror and revolt is in having WM6 as the 2nd OS. Ok, I’m not entirely against it, but seeing how past HPC, PPC and WM devices have their apps stuck in OS-stasis brings chills to me. Imagine a few years down the road and running ancient apps on sideshow while the main OS (on hdd) gets upgraded … *shiver*

Hi
we have it protype samples
email us : sales@ihyperware.com
regards,

At a 7 inch screen and thickness as described, this seems closer to a small tablet laptop, than it is umpc. For the comparable size dimensions, not sure I see the true portability over a small/mini tablet laptop, and this has a huge price premium for the specs compared to a normal tablet (dynamism is pre-selling now at $1500 USD, for just the machine without any accessories). No way this fits in a pocket or is ultra-portable. What’s the point then?

Re Hugo, always love his reviews. But he is always overjoyed when reviewing anything new. See his past reviews for OQO, Everun, and the like. As an example, when he first reviewed the OQO 02, he praised it’s real digitized touchscreen over the type that’s with the HTC Shift, and he liked the true portability (small size compared to his Samsung Q1 — also 7 inches like this HTC Shift by the way), and so on. Yet, now, suddenly the HTC is perfect size wise and with the opposite type of touchscreen, etc.

He moves on to new products so quickly, that the longterm value of his reviews seems limited. Rather, his reviews seem to really only have value for whatever the newest item is and whether it is “cool” on first take. Well, usually all new technology meets that test.

Hugo, what do you say?

Am I also right in seeing that dreadfully slow return from Hibernation? Granted, it’s not supposed to be a replacement for a laptop, but am I supposed to be able to fry a whole chicken while it boots back up? Holy Chicken Gizzards.

I too think that HTC missed the boat with a native resolution of 800×480. Seven inch screens are too big for that resolution which needs to be 1024×600 at a minimum.

I look forward to getting my hands on a Shift to try out. The keyboard does look awesome but I question the ability to touch type on it. The P1610 is about an inch wider meaning the keyboard is an inch wider than the Shift’s and I can just barely touchtype on the P1610 keyboard. I question if I can touchtype on the Shift keyboard. IMHO putting a full keyboard on these devices is a waste of cost, space and weight if you cannot touchtype on them.

The HTC Shift is closer to being the perfect device but when will a company have the shift with voice command, the battery life we need, the screnn of 1024 x 600 and a great key.typing setup. I have been waiting sine Febuary 2004 when I first heard about the Flipstart.

Nicholas – I see what you mean about having the ability to take care of small tasks on the Pocket PC side of the Shift, but I already have a WM device that does that quite well which I would be carrying anyways and is a lot more convenient since it is so pocketable. Like I said, the device itself is still amazing and still very alluring, but everyone has different needs when it comes to mobility, mine just don’t happen to be met by having a dual OS with no voice capability. HTC continues to push the boundaries and having them enter the UMPC realm can only be a good thing. It’s a step in the right direction and like theQill mentions, gets us one step closer to bridging the gap.

I think it’s mostly great, but I’m a little dismayed. I want to replace my R2H, but I want a device that has little chance of vectoring on me, and this isn’t it.

The whole point of having the Windows Mobile OS on there is so you can check your email, next calender appointment use GPS navigation of Google/Live Maps without having to boot into Vista. Obviously if you’re at a coffee shop, then you can boot into vista and use Outlook 07 etc to get your work done, but for quick email replies, maps etc Windows Mobile on this device wouold be awesome. The expected price is to come under $2,000 (AUD) so that’s around $1,680 (USD)

poor battery life (2 hours in real use)

800×480 (dont make me laugh)

*thumb* touchpad sucks (try the terrible Flipstart 1, sticks are much better)

PocketPC OS/CPU/RAM will raise the cost & is somewhat pointless. i thought the WHOLE point of these machines are to bridge the PDA/laptop gap & get AWAY from the WM OS?