HTC S730 review

Cue the hidden secret. Push the S730's screen to the left and out pops a tiny QWERTY keyboard.

The HTC S730 looks more like a phone than a tablet PC but it still packs a hefty punch with WiFi, HSDPA and a sliding QWERTY keyboard

Often HTC’s Windows Mobile devices are the large-format, tablet style smartphones that integrate a big touch-sensitive screen. They are ideal for looking at complex information like Web pages, but are often chunky to carry around.

The alternative, if you are a Windows Mobile fan, is something more like the HTC S730. The S730 is a smartphone that actually looks like a phone. It's a bit hefty considering it is a candybar style smartphone, but it does have a hidden secret that helps account for that, and it offers plenty of punch in other areas too.

The HTC S730 runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition. That means its screen is not touch-sensitive. In turn, that means you have to use buttons on the S730 to get around. Clearly it's important that these are well designed to make your activities as painless as possible.

Let’s consider that hidden secret first in this respect. The S730 has plenty of word-hungry smartphone capability. You can compose SMS messages and emails. You can make calendar appointments and To Do tasks. You can write notes. And, thanks to the inclusion of Office Mobile, you can edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents (and view PowerPoint presentations too).

The front of the S730 has an ordinary-looking number pad with QWERTY letters sharing the number keys and you can use these keys for data entry if that suits you. XT9 is built in, which means things like predictive autocompletion of words. If you get on with the system it is fast, but if you don’t you can switch back to ordinary T9.

You might, though, want something a little more like a real keyboard. Cue the hidden secret. Push the phone’s screen to the left and out pops a tiny QWERTY keyboard. The screen pushes itself into wide mode so you can read it sideways on, and you are ready to start typing.

The mini keyboard isn’t that much faster to use than the XT9 system with the number pad, and you are unlikely to be able to cope with it one handed as you can with the number pad, but even so, for typing longer texts we found it came in very handy. And the XT9 system works with it so you can mix and match both worlds and find one which suits you best.

The keyboard is the main reason that the S730 is a fairly sizeable smartphone. It measures a generous 17.7mm thick, which puts it right at the top of the chubby league for a modern candybar style phone, smartphone or not. Its other proportions aren’t oversized at 50mm wide and 101mm tall, but it is unlikely you’ll be able to push the S730 into a tight jeans pocket.

Internal specifications

If we start to look at the internal specifications we will see that there is quite a lot of good stuff going on. The HTC S730 is quad-band handset with 3G and sitting above the screen on the right hand side is a small camera for two-way video calling.

Importantly the S730 supports HSDPA. This gives it the potential for data download at speeds up to 3.6Mb/s where you can get a signal. If you are into mobile Web browsing you might find the faster speed useful. There is 256MB of Flash storage and 64MB of RAM. When we checked our review sample we found it had 124MB of free storage space. This should be enough for synchronising Outlook with your PC and for installing a few additional applications.

But if you want to store music on the S730 you are going to need microSD cards. The slot is on the right edge of the handset. When it comes to music playback HTC does its usual trick of not including a 3.5mm headset jack. We always feel let down when one of these is missing because it means we can’t easily use our own headphones. The headset that comes with the S730 is not two-piece, so if you do want to use a 3.5mm headset you’ll need a USB converter for it.

We’ve noted already that the screen is not touch-sensitive. HTC has put its own HTC Today screen on the S730 as an alternative to the Windows Mobile standard ones. This offers you various views of the kinds of information you would expect a smartphone to display on its main screen. You can see incoming messages, voicemails and missed calls, upcoming appointments.

In addition, in a large area above this lot you can choose to view either the current time, a selection of speed dials with tiny photos to identify them, or the current weather. The weather information is downloaded over the air and once you have it you can see today’s information as well as a forecast for the next four days.

Both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are built in. The latter in particular is good to see. It is fast becoming a requirement for any smartphone, to the point that one without it is likely to get a raised eyebrow. You have quick access to turning Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off as well as sending the phone into flight mode by tapping a button on the left side of the S730.

There is, of course, a camera. It is disappointing that it lacks a flash and also that is shoots only up to 2 megapixels. With no autofocus or macro mode the camera is definitely on the average side.

Overall, though, the HTC S730 is an impressive piece of kit in that a lot has been crammed into it. However, it is a bit large for many pockets, and the screen is small compared to many Windows Mobile 6 Professional devices.

If you really need a sliding keyboard because you are keen on data entry and text editing, then it might be worth checking out some Windows Mobile Professional devices. Some are barely larger than the S730 but have bigger, touch-sensitive screens and larger sliding keyboards too.

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