Design
The design of the HTC S710 is very pretty. When I was looking for a new smartphone the S710 was one of the best-looking Windows Mobile phones I could find. It has lots of features and a large display but the phone is still pretty small. It's barely bigger than my old Sony Ericsson T610, but it's a bit heavier. Some people may not like the weight of the S710, the phone weighs 140g, but for me this wasn't really a problem.
The QWERTY keyboard is also a nice feature of this phone, the spring-loaded mechanism works really well. Overall the build quality of the S710 seems to be pretty good.
Hardware
The S710 features a 201MHz processor from TI. Opening programs sometimes takes a second or two but overall the speed of the phone is still acceptable. They could place a faster processor in the device but this would have a bad effect on the battery life. While I was doing some research about this phone I noticed that it's possible to overclock the phone with special software. Some folks report it's possible to run the phone stable with the CPU overclocked to 240MHz.
The S710 has 64MB RAM memory and 128MB of flash ROM (with about 50MB available to the user) which can be used to storage files. If you're going to buy this phone I recommend that you buy a microSD memory card together with the phone. A 1GB or 2GB microSD memory card doesn't cost a lot of money and will significantly boost the storage capacity of your phone. This will allow you to install more programs, take thousands of photos, carry some music albums with you, ...
Display
The display of the S710 is pretty big and very bright. Except in very sunny light conditions the screen is also easy-to-read when you're outside.
Software
As this is a smartphone the capabilities of the S710 are very big. The phone features lots of software but you can also download additional Windows Mobile or Java applications on the Internet. Unfortunately the amount of applications that works on Windows Mobile 6 is still pretty limited. Some tips: Google Maps is available for download at www.google.com/gmm and you can also install Skype to make cheap calls over a WiFi network.
Besides regular phone features like a contact list, missed calls log, SMS and MMS messages the phone also has lots of other features. Lets take a quick look. You can use the phone to send/receive e-mails and the phone also has a mobile version of Internet Explorer. There's the camera software, an organizer, a very detailed configurations menu, a task planner, a mobile version of Windows Live Messenger, ActiveSync to sync the phone with your PC, a mobile version of Windows Media Player to play MP3s and videos, two games: Bubble Breaker and Patience, mobile versions of Adobe Reader, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile and Word Mobile. These applications only allow you to view documents, it's not possible to edit them.
The phone also features a calculator, speech notes, an alarm to wake you up with your favorite MP3 song, Windows Explorer, Bluetooth explorer, Windows Live search, a communications manager to activate the airplane mode, deactivate the phone mode, turn on Bluetooth, turn on WiFi and some other features. The phone also supports Java and Internet sharing (this makes your phone act as an external modem for your notebook/PDA).
I've uploaded a small video to YouTube to show off some of the phone's features.
In the first video I just browse a bit through the menus so you can see how it looks like. Some of the programs you see in the menu of my phone aren't installed by default, like Google Maps and Screen Capture.
Unfortunately the video is pretty shaky, my apologies for this.
I also made a second movie to show off the slide-out keyboard:
Battery life
The battery life of the S710 is a bit disappointing. I've been using the phone for a couple of weeks now and mostly I have to recharge it after 2-3 days. However, I believe that if I used the phone a bit less the battery may last up to four days.
Phone reception, Internet, WiFi
The S710 has excellent reception and the voice quality is pretty good.
The phone can connect to the Internet via GRPS and WiFi, 3G isn't supported. I initially had some problems with the configuration of the GRPS settings but then I found this network settings wizard on HTC's website. This program automatically configures all the GRPS, WAP and MMS settings and it supports various European cell phone carriers.
The included mobile Internet Explorer browser works pretty good, but some sites may not render properly because of the small resolution of the phone's display. Also, one of the things I'm still missing is the support for Flash.
WiFi on the S710 works pretty well but the downloading and rendering times of the web pages aren't as fast as I would like them to be. It's faster than GPRS but lots slower than on my notebook.
Recommended: Click Here to check your PC for common system errors
Previous Page (2/4)
