By Julian Prokaza on Thursday, 10 January 2008
 HTC announced the S730 Windows Mobile smartphone back in October and
claimed this successor to the excellent S710 would
be available later that month. Alas, review units were very slow to materialise but a good month after it eventually went on sale, the S730 is finally starting to circulate among journalists. So, was it worth the wait?
Little has changed cosmetically with the S730. It's fractionally larger
than the S710 and 10g heavier, and the case is a little more
rectangular. It's finished in metallic grey rather silver, which lends
the handset a serious but stylish air. The keypad layout has been
tweaked a little, but apart from the removal of the rubber flap that
covers the USB port, its business as usual, button-wise. The volume
rocker button on the left of the case is much harder to press that on
the the S710 though, and needs a fingernail pressed firmly on either
end to activate.
The S730 has the same sliding case design as the S710 but the Qwerty keyboard
tucked away in its bottom half has had a bit of a makeover too. The keys are
now closely spaced and each has a small rounded rectangle in its centre to raise
the profile for typing. The idea isn't wholly successful and we prefer the more
widely spaced keys of the S710, but typing is easy enough.
The pale blue legends for alternate key functions don't work particularly well
on the black keys though, and punctuation symbols in particular can be hard
to make out under fluorescent office lighting. The keyboard is backlit, but
this is controlled by an ambient light sensor and only kicks in when you're
typing in the dark.
So far, so S710 but the S730's big new feature is HSPDA support - something
that its predecessor lacked. In addition to much faster download speeds, this
also makes video calls a possibility and the 2-megapixel camera on the back
of the case is now joined by a VGA camera on the front for that purpose (does
anyone actually make video calls on a mobile?).
3G also entails a faster processor and the S730 now has a 400MHz Qualcomm
chip and twice the ROM of the S710 (though the same 64Mb of RAM). Despite this
extra power though, the S730 actually feels slower than the S710 in use. It
takes a good second or two to open an application for the first time and two
seconds for the display to flip into landscape mode when the keyboard is opened
- we even saw the occasional Windows Mobile hourglass when opening the Start
menu.
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.
HTC S730
| Price
|
£284.95 |
| Rating
|
4 out of 6 |
| Good
|
Faster processor; HSDPA |
| Bad
|
Sluggish operation; GPS disabled |
| Verdict
|
A well-price Windows Mobile Standard smartphone, but the new
features come with the penalty of comparatively poor performance |
| Manufacturer
|
HTC
|
| Buy
from |
Expansys
|
Specifications
| Operating
system |
Windows Mobile 6 Standard |
| Processor
|
Qualcomm MSM 7200 (400MHz)
|
| System
memory |
256Mb |
| User
memory |
64Mb (microSD card slot) |
| Screen
|
2.4in (320 x 240) |
| Bands
|
HSDPA/UMTS 2100 MHz; GSM/GPRS/EDGE Quad-band
|
| Camera
|
Main camera 2 megapixel; second camera VGA |
| Other
|
Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11g |
| Quoted
battery life |
290 hours GSM/388 hours UMTS standby; 318 mins GSM/210 mins UMTS talktime
|
| Size
|
105.8 x 51 x 19.4mm |
| Weight
|
150g |
|
