HTC TyTN II review

HTC’s TyTN II is one of the most popular Windows Mobile Professional smartphones on the block. You can pick it up SIM-free for about £450 or from various operators. Orange is selling it as the HTC TyTN II while O2 has it as the Xda Stellar and T-Mobile as the MDA Vario III.

What is so great about this smartphone is its combination of features and usability into one pretty small and tidy package. It really packs the features in, and while you do notice its weight and size in your hand and pocket, there is very little smartphone stuff that it is not capable of doing.

Let’s tackle that size and weight for starters, though.

Weighing in at 190g this is a heavy device. It is possible to find a smartphone that is less than half this weight. Any of the BlackBerry Pearl variants, for example. Size-wise too, this is no shrinking violet. At 112mm tall the TyTN II is not unduly lanky for a smartphone, and nor is 59mm of width over the odds. But the 19mm of thickness is rather more than we are used to. So you need large pockets to carry this device around all the time.

The main reason for the over-large size is that the TyTN II incorporates a miniature keyboard. This is not unusual for a smartphone, and it is the kind of feature that delights anybody interested in writing a lot of text, be that email, notes to yourself or even proper documents in Microsoft Word.

We say Microsoft Word because the HTC TyTN II runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional, and that means it comes complete with what Microsoft calls Office Mobile. This is a suite of three applications, Excel Mobile, Word Mobile and PowerPoint Mobile. With the latter you can only view documents, showing presentations on your smartphone.

But with Excel Mobile and Word Mobile you can edit documents. Obviously you don’t get all the functions of the desktop versions of these applications, but there is enough here to tweak documents sent to you by email and bang them off to someone else to work on.

Anyway, back to that keyboard. Design matters a lot with smartphone Qwerty keyboards. Some are hard to get to grips with because of small size or poor ergonomics. This one is superb. The keys are relatively large and they are raised in their centre, giving them good tactile feel.

A number pad is embedded into some of the Qwerty keys and you can access it with a function key. There is a caps lock, plenty of non qwerty-characters accessible with a function key combination, and more accessible via the touch screen when you hit a specific keyboard key.

When you slide the keyboard out the screen flips itself from portrait to landscape, so you can easily view whatever application you are trying to use.

But we’ve seen that before. What is entirely new and unique to the HTC TyTN II is that you can tilt the screen upwards from the flat to an angle of about 45 degrees. This might not sound like much, but trust us. When the TyTN II is sitting on a desk with its keyboard out looking for all the world like a tiny laptop computer, the tilted screen means you can see incoming SMS and email messages, your calendar, or whatever else you have displayed on the screen.

There is more to the TyTN II than its keyboard and tilty screen, though.

This smartphone has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in, the former being great particularly if you have a home Wi-Fi network and like to do a bit of Web browsing over it via your smartphone, or if you like to use hotspots when out and about.

And speaking of being out and about, the TyTN II is one of those smartphones with a GPS antenna firmly embedded into its innards. Add on some third-party navigation software and you have a satnav in your pocket. With this little beast at your beck and call, then, you don’t need a dedicated separate satnav device cluttering up your gadget drawer.

It probably won’t come as much of a surprise by now to learn that the HTC TyTN II is a 3G handset. After all, it does pretty much everything else. There is a front facing camera so you can make two-way video calls, and a main camera whose lens sits on the back of the casing for you to take photos and shoot video. It has a 3 megapixel sensor. There is no self portrait mirror or flash, though.

The HTC TyTN II supports HSDPA which means a theoretical maximum data download speed of 3.6Mbps. When it comes to memory there is a microSD card slot on one of the short edges, which you can use to expand the built-in memory.

The screen deserves a little more attention. While it might appear a little small because of the large bank of shortcut buttons beneath it, it is in fact a fair size for a Windows Mobile smartphone. It measures a fairly healthy 2.8 inches from corner to corner and has a resolution of 220 x 240 pixels. Maybe we’d have liked to see more pixels – some Windows Mobile smartphones manage 640 x 480. But the greater pixel count can be a drain on the battery.

And mentioning battery life brings us on to considering how well the HTC TyTN II performs away from mains power. Obviously with Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G buzzing away you do need to pay some attention to the battery to ensure you don’t run it down too quickly. We’d rate it as average, and if you are a heavy user of the features just mentioned, or indeed a music fan as the TyTN II can play tunes via the Windows Media Player, then you will need to factor daily battery charging into your regime.

Hefty it may be, but if you are on the hunt for the smartphone with everything, then the TyTN II is a pretty tough device to improve on.