HTC S730

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Review

Since there's no touch-screen, the S730 comes with Windows Mobile 6 Standard and we actually prefer this keyboard-controlled variant of the operating system. It's much more user friendly on devices with a small screen and the lack of a touch-sensitive layer makes for a much crisper display.

Sadly, HSDPA doesn't make a great deal of difference to web browsing with Pocket Internet Explorer. It's certainly faster than with GPRS, but Pocket Internet Explorer is still sluggish when it comes to rendering web pages (and rendering them poorly, at that) -- and it's much the same with Wi-Fi.

Another disappointment is that despite having built-in GPS, this feature won't be enabled on S730 handsets sold in the UK. The GPS chip is present, but there's no software to support it. Some enterprising hacker will no doubt figure out a way to enable GPS before too long, but it may not be worth it - some reviewers have seen early GPS-enabled S730's and its performance, by all accounts, is less than stellar. 

Despite having 43.73Mb of available user memory (it's unclear how this is derived from the supposed 64Mb), the S730 only has 18.9Mb actually available for use fresh from the box. This makes a microSD card pretty much essential if you want to install third-party applications -- Windows Mobile uses RAM to install additional applications, as well as run them. More worryingly, early S730 owners have reported memory issues with the S730, with what meagre memory there is dwindling more rapidly than it should, resulting in frequent ‘out of memory' errors.

This would appear to be a bug, but there was no official acknowledgement of it from HTC at the time of writing. We weren't able to reproduce it ourselves either, so we'll just mention this as something to be aware of rather than cite it as a major problem, at least at this stage.

Since it only costs £35 more than the S710, the S730 is certainly tempting if you're looking for a Windows Mobile smartphone but don't fancy one of the larger (and rather fiddlier) Professional handsets. The inclusion of HTC's usual interface tweaks makes Windows Mobile a little easier on the eye and while HSDPA support may not do much for Pocket Internet Explorer, but it turns the S730 into a viable Bluetooth modem for a laptop. As a successor to the excellent S710 though, the S730 simply doesn't offer enough improvements to warrant an award, but caveats aside, it's still recommended.

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