The novelty is one of the few VGA-based PDA phones available on the today's market. We've mentioned for a numebr of times that this feature is more of a marketing trick than an actual advantage. The reason for such a conclusion is quite evident - the real dimensions of the screen are rather small. If you view a screenshot taken from such a device on your PC screen, that will be quite self-explaining - even devices that use 10-12'' screens offer a comfortable screen resolution of 640x480 that won't break your eyes. The PDA phones are quite a different story, coming with screens about 3'' in diagonal. Some web sites are a torture to view at an VGA resolution even in a peaceful environment, imagine doing the same during a bumpy ride in public transport.

That's why the WM platform leader, the HTC company, aren't trying to keep up with the latest trends as hard as they can, leaving the trick to the lesser market players like E-TEN which regard such features as their only trump in the competition. The most widespread advertismant slogan sounds like 'you get four times as large a resolution' but no mentions are made about the screen size staying the same - so basically the only thing you get is smoother fonts, and for the most part that's nothing but a commercial trick exploited by some lesser market players.

Fortunately, Gigabyte didn't only limit themselves to adding an VGA screen. The novelty is equipped with the maximum possible number of modules that would ever fit in the device's casing. A vast arsenal of telecom features (Wi-Fi included) neighbours an integrated GPS module, let alone the auto-focusing camera and a number of other features like a spacious RAM and a high performance CPU. The most eye-catching drawback is the lack of EDGE support. Let's check the ambitious novelty in detail and have a thorough comparison to E-TEN glofiish X800.

	Gigabyte GSmart i350 main characteristics
Communications	GSM 850/900/1800/1900, GPRS
Operating System	Windows Mobile 6 Professional
CPU	Intel PXA270, 520 Mhz
Storage	256 Mb of ROM, 64 Mb of RAM miniSD slot, no memory card bundled
Screen	touchscreen, 2,6", VGA (480х640), 65K
Communications	USB2.0, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR, A2DP supported)
Camera	2 Mpix (up to 1600 x 1200), auto-focusing
Battery	capacity - 1300 mAh up to 160 hours of standby up to 4.5 hours of talk time
GPS	+
Keyboard	-
FM tuner	-
Dimensions	110 x 54 x 18 mm
Weight	130 g
Estimated price	550 euros

The sales package content is quite original for a PDA phone. The bundling doesn't include a phone case, but a lot of other accessories are meant to be a rich compensation. A spare stylus, a car charger and 3.5 mm headset jack adapter. Then there come the data cable, wire headset, a regular charger and a battery, and of course a software disk and user's manual. No memory card is bundled though - the avarice of WM-based PDA phone vendors reaches an comical scale.

Design and Ergonomics

The Gigabyte GSmart i350 PDA phone utilizes a form factor quite characteristic of all the WM devices - as you've already guessed it's a candy bar supplied with a touchscreen and a block of controls just below. The body surface is glossy, thus it accumulates grease easily. It's entirely made of plastic. The material is of an irreproachable quality. We didn't spot any worn areas or scratches after a month of active testing at all. There's a slight play between the battery cover and the rest of the casing, a subtle screach can be heard if you squeeze the device really hard, but nothing out of the limits.

The design is quite stylish and has a simple, natural feeling about it, but to some it looks a bit childish or at least not serious enough. If solid looks are a key feature to you, we'd suggest looking for something by E-TEN, those preserve a more conservative mood, though X800 was a betrayal of all the principles. As for our personal opinion, the new GSmart design was quite to our liking, save for the easily soiled surface.

Let's compare the exterior looks to E-TEN glofiish X800:

Thanks to the well-balanced construction Gigabyte GSmart i350 assumes a comfortable position in the hands, even the considerable thickness of its body is almost imperceptible. The weight also doesn't feel like a problem, unlike the competitive models which are often complained about as being way too heavy. However the trick is in the smart weight balancing, and the device isn't lighter than its competitors in any remarkable way. The navigation block also enjoys a very handy impelentation - the button are large enough not to pose any inconvenience, the keystroke is tight enough - much better than the same things with X800.

The side edge elements enjoy a well-orchestrated placement. The memory extension slot fully supports the hot swapping feature. The data cable slot is of the standard miniUSB type, but the headset socket is of a non-standard brand type, which can hardly make anyone happy. The bundled 3.5 mm adapter saves the say. The camera launch button is two-positioned, just like with all auto-focusing cameras.

Communications

Gigabyte GSmart i350 sports a rich set of telecom features - the list of toys missing includes the radio and the 3G support (the latter is the favorite boasting matter of E-TEN as seen in their X800 advertisments). The more serious drawbacks involve the troubling lack of EDGE while GPRS is fully supported. The rest of features are quite regular. The device is designed to operate in GSM 850/900/1800/1900 networks. The wire communication is done through the USB2.0 protocol, the slot type is miniUSB. The data transfer speed is quite pleasing. There's no support for the Mass Storage mode, PictPridge is missing as well. A separate window allows to switch the connection mode, which is accessible through the corresponding shortcut on the Today screen or the Settings Menu.

The wireless communications of i350 include Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) and Wi-Fi. Both modules operate in a most impecable way. The realisation of A2DP is simply brilliant - the sound is loud and of a very high quality, no connection releases ever happened - everything up to HTC's level. Unfortunately, when a connection is aborted, the audio transmission isn't stop, the integrated speaker is activated automatically. Unfortunately, that's a disease of the whole WM platform, not this model in particular. Besides A2DP, the following profiles are supported:

• File Transfer
• Generic Access
• Generic Object Exchange
• Handsfree
• Headset
• HID
• Object Push
• Personal Area Networking
• Serial Port
• Audio/Video Remote Control
• SAP (SIM card access profile)

Bluetooth synchronization is possible, you just require to take the following actions:

. Configure the Windows Mobile Device Centre application or the ActiveSync program on your PC.
. On the PDA side - Start > Programs > ActiveSync.
. Activate Bluettoh both on PC and the PDA phone, engage the visibility mode.
. On the PDA side - Menu > Connection - Bluetooth.
. On the first connection just launch the Bluetooth configuration wizard.

This feature is inaccessible for Wi-Fi due to security concerns, this was used in earlier versions of AKU back in the time of WM5.

The i350 model is supplied with a GPS module based off the SiRFstartIII chip. The level of implementation is average, only 7 satellites were spotted on a clear day, in the urban jungle our out in the woods the number was reduced to 5. Though there's the pleasant possibility to add coordinate stamps to the acquired photos as a kind of user POI. As for the maps, it's planned that the majority of models will use Navitel but some will have none. An integrated route tracker is present.

Gigabyte GSmart i350 has 64 Mb of RAM and 256 Mb of ROM. That's enough for the basic level of functionality but little more than that. Unfortunately, there's no memory card in the sales package, so you have to spend extra money. The slot type is miniSD, which is less widespread nowadays than the most popular microSD. The maximum card capacity supported by the device is 4 Gb.

Screen

The screen of Gigabyte GSmart i350 is remarkable for its VGA matrix, which makes the picture look sharper and more detailed. But don't expect any cardinal changes. Due to the modest diagonal of 2.6'' the image looks better than that seen on screens of E-TEN products. Whether this sacrifice of the screen size is worthy of this illusionary improvement is an ambigous question, since this also harms the ergonomics. As for the rest of the features, everything is all right, the image is bright, sports good contrast and vivid colors (despite of 65K) and has excellent view angles. The screen of the device stays quite legible even in broad daylight.

Let's dwell deeper in the darker side of VGA technology. Everything below is equally true for Gigabyte products and the rest of PDA phone manufacturers alike, all of them trying to reinvent the wheel after Microsoft by offering a 640x480 resolution with a screen diagonal of 640x480. It's a well known truth that the more you strain your eyes, the more they suffer from the medical point of view. Even those who spend hours in front of a normal PC screen often find themselves suffering from various eyesight disorders. Now think how hard on your eyes is reading something on your PDA phone in the dim lights of a subway car shaking like hell as it moves along. Now think: 640x480 primarily stands for tiny hi-definition fonts, and reading something in a such small font in a terrible environment like that is going to kill your eyes. You have to adjust the fonts all the time to sort out a comfortable view, and that doesn't always work for web pages because of the difference in fonts. Either you spend most of the time adjusting the fonts and applications or you're forced to read texts in a very small, eye-hurting mod. Our testers spent a long night at the office arguing over the mystery of the VGA screen: is it a feature or a bug, after all?

The Windows Mobile Platform used in Gigabyte GSmart i350 has a quite common interface without any extra modules like in HTC products. However, there's some sort of trademark customization, for instance the shortcut bar in the Today screen found in the right bottom conrner and the quick menu conjured by holding the Start button pressed for a few moments (the manual calls it the Flag button - the one with the Windows trademark logo). This menu is a really intereting feature allowing to do quick changes to the audio profile, brighness levels and quickly close the running applications. Unfortunately, you can't edit the list of items in these menus so the usability of these two features is disputable.

The top line is used for displaying service indicators like: the signal level, the battery charge level, the clock and the wireless protocols availability status: BT, GPRS. The bottom line shows the touch button descriptions.

The main area of the screen can be customized to the user's liking. By default the screen elements comprise the current date indicator, the mobile operator info, the owner's data, message indicators, the tasklist and the info field (showing service indicators like the battery charge level, the screen rotation status, the wireless protocol manager and the backlighting level). The user is free to change the order in which these fields are shown or force them to disappear from the screen entirely. The Today screen may feature a custom wallpaper made of a picture either downloaded from somewhere or taken right from your photo gallery.

There are two kinds of menus: quick access menu and main menu. The first is opened by holding the Start button pressed for a few moments and looks like an adjustable vertical row of 7 items, the info about the 5 recently activated applications, the options tab and the shortcut to the main menu. The main menu is a list of all the applications - looks much like the desktop version of Windows, all the same icons with descriptions right below. Up to 12 icons can fit into the field of view.

Preinstalled Software Package

Gigabyte GSmart i350 sports the following software packages (either preinstalled or available from the bundled software disk): The office software package Office Mobile consists of:

• Excel Mobile for creating, editing and viewing MS Excel books
• PowerPoint Mobile for watching MS PowerPoint presentations
• Word Mobile for creating, editing and viewing MS Word documents

The PIM utilities include:

• A calendar for business and personal event management
• Tasks for keeping a neat task schedule
• Contacts for storing business contact information of your colleagues and friends
• Notes for putting down short handwritten or typed reminders and images as well as making voice records
• QuickMark for QD code recoginition
• SPB Backup for making backups of user data
• ZIP is the primary archiver software

Multimedia applications comprise:

• Photo and Video for image and video file management.
• Voice recorder, which also allows the voice records to be player, sent over email, MMS and other means of telecommunication.
• Voice dialing, which lets record voice tags for phone numbers and applications.
• Windows Live, Messenger
• Windows Media Player Mobile is the audio and video player
• Streaming multimedia is used to watch realtime and on-demand videos in the web.
• Bubble Breaker and Solitaire - the preinstalled games
• Camera for taking pictures and shooting video clips

A number of web applications:

• Internet Explorer Mobile is the web browser acting as a web download manager as well.
• The Common Internet for connecting to the World Wide Web with your PDA phone.
• Remote Desktop is the software used for remote controlling a PC
• Marketplace - used to download new software

Telecom utilities, including:

• Comm Manager for managing Wi-Fi, GPRS, Bluetooth and ActiveSync connections; it also allows to turn the phone on and off, switch between the ringtone/vibro call modes, activate and deactivate the Direct Push function. • ActiveSync for phone-to-PC or phone-to-ExhangeServer synchronization.
• GSmart BT for enhanced Bluetooth management.

Call service software:

• Phone - calls, switching between calls, conference calls
• MMS/SMS messaging service
• SIM card manager, dealing with contact records stored on the USIM/SIM card
• Blacklist for blocking undesired calls

The GPS software:

• Route tracker

The rest of the applications are:

• Calculator for doing basic maths
• file manager, self-explaining
• for downloading and installing Java applications


Settings

The Phone application is what stands in control of all the call funcitons in Gigabyte GSmart i350, which can be activated in two ways - by pressing the call button or go to the start menu then activate the corresponding menu item. The main application screen has three tabs: Calls, Speed Dial and Phone Settings.

The contact records are stored in the Contacts application. The SIM-stored card numbers fall on the same list with the rest. Contacts can be moved from the phone to the SIM card and vice versa. There are three types of contacts:

• Microsoft Office Outlook contacts, which can be created right on the phone or synchronized with the PC or Exchange Server. Each contact record can store a phone number, an e-mail address, instant messaging service names, home and work addresses and miscellaneous info like the work position, birth date and a lot of other fields. An Outlook contact can also be associated with a unique image and/or a ringtone.
• USIM/SIM contacts. Only one phone number is allowed per contact.
• The Windows Live contacts which are used by the MSN, short for the Windows Live Messenger application. Similar to Outlook contacts, Windows Live contacts are supplied with the same fields.

The USIM/SIM card can store only one phone number per contact. If you copy a multi-number contact to the USIM/SIM memory, the SIM Manager application splits it into a number of independent contact records each with a different number, and these records are given suffixes like /M, /W and /H standing for Mobile, Work and Home numbers.

To call a person, you can use the following menus: Phone, Contacts, Speed Dial, Calls or the SIM Card Manager. Traditionally the Smart Dialing option is supported, making phone call procedure easier. Once you enter the initial digits of a phone number of the initial letter of a person's name, the PDA phone begins sorting the records to meet the requirements both in the contact book and on the SIM card, and in the call log as well. Then you can select one of the found records to dial that person.

By defaul the call log shows records of all the calls, but you can choose to filter one exact type only: missed, outgoing or incoming calls, sorting by contact names is also possible. In addition to the contact name and the phone number each call log record displays time, date and the length of each call.

The capacity of the contact book is solely limited by the amount of free memory left. Each contact record can be associated with 12 unique phone numbers, 3 e-mail addresses, a work and a home address, a webpage address and a lot of parameters up to the assistant's phone number. There's an option to assign an individual ringtone and a picture. Contact records can be divided into user groups to the owner's liking.

The Wise Talk options tab is especially remarkable (earlier versions of GSmart products used the Handset Application name). It consists of a few tabs and used for configuring the autoresponder, background effects and the talk recording. The answering machine can be activated after 10, 15 or 20 seconds, you can record a custom greeting phrase or use one from the few preinstalled. Once you get back to your phone, you'll see a notice prompting to listen to the recorded response. You can set the storage location for the voice records beforehand, selecting from user memory and memory card.

The background effects is a feature rarely encountered on PDA phones as a preinstalled component - however Gigabyte products are an exception. Depending on the settings one of the ambient sound themes can be set for automatic playback during the talk with a customizable sound volume (ranging from 20% to 80%, the possible effects include Airport, Car, Concert, Meeting, Film, Railway Station, Office, Station, Street, and user sounds can be added as well). At last, there's an option to record all the talks either to the memory card or to the user memory.

The blacklisting application is another nice addition - you can block certain undesired contact records from any calls coming from the associated numbers as well as automatically refuse all calls from unfamiliar numbers.

Messaging system

The Messages application on Gigabyte GSmart i350 is quite a traditional feature for the WM platform, it's used to compose, read and send SMS and MMS messages as well as e-mail. Once you get a new incoming message, the corresponding indicator shows up in the Today screen. Sorting is present, e.g. you can set a filter for the incoming messages so only the headers containing a specific word are displayed.

An incoming message is indicated with a pop up window that appears regardless of the menu you're currently in. You instantly open the message, delete it or choose to ignore. It's really convenient that all the messages are stored in a single folder, and a tree index is used to access them. The keyboard text input has been discussed above, the MioKeyboard is as comfortable as they come.

The E-mail options include auto delivery (a certain time interval is set, defining the period of time between automatic mail checks), also you can set the message delivery mode (define how old in days can a message be in order to pass the filter and be downloaded), activate automatical incoming mail check every time you send something and make use of the delivery schedule which will see to it that the mail is delivered while the web traffic is the cheapest.

If there's a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 used, the message will be loaded at once and not on the next synchronization, HTML support is available. If the message contains several attachments, all of them are loaded at once, delayed download is supported. You can use key combinations for rapid access to the Respond or Forward functions, etc.

The security system is not bad at all. For instance, the ActiveSync application can be set to digital signing for the documents and enable encryption for all outgoing messages, the Information Rights Management meny allows to limit access to certain sections like the messages and so on.

PIM

The Calendar application is used for planning meetings, conferences and other events. The Today screen displays the current day's tasks exported from the calendar. If you've got the Outlook application installed on your PC, you can synchronize schedules. A system of reminders utilizes sound and visual signals. The Calendar application can be used for negotiating with people over e-mail, provided that your addresse uses Outlook or Outlook Mobile. You can automatically dispatch invitations to a circle of selected persons, if someone accepts it the meeting event is automatically added to their schedule. On receipt of the confirmation notice you calendar info is updated as well. That's the strong side of the WM platform, which explains why the WM products are so popular among the businessmen and the manager kind.

The vCalendar is fully supported (a stadart file format used for exhange of business data concerning plans, tasks and schedules) the corresponding files can be stored in the Outlook applicaiton on the PC.

The Tasks tab is used for keeping a list of current tasks, those can be one-time or recurring. You can assign reminders to each task event and categorize them in different groups. A comprehensive list of tasks is available, expired tasks are indicated in the red. You can set a reminder to be added automatically to every new task added to the list.

The Notes tab is used for leaving quick notes. You can either input the text from the keyboard, do some handwriting or record your voice. It's possible to convert handwriting into regular text and send them over to people. If a letter crosses more than two lines of the greed, it's recognized as an image rather than text. To highlight an image (e.g. to copy or delete it) you have to press the stylus on the image for a few moments.

The Office Mobile software package consists of three applications which serve to edit and view Microsoft documents: Word Mobile (supports viewing and editing of *.doc, *.rtf, *.txt and *.dot files), Excel Mobile (viewing and editing of *.xls files), PowerPoint Mobile (viewing and editing of *.ppt and *.pps files).