i-mate Pocket PC Phone (aka XDAII/MDA II) was
introduced in Dubai (UAE) by Carrier Devicesfor
the first time in the 7th of October 2003 according to this press
release, and it was made
available in Gitex in the 19th of October. I got my
hands on it since it was released and now it is with me for ten days, I
thought of sharing my experience and write this review to see if this
device is a leap ahead or a step ahead in the converged device
technology. The i-mate can be considered as a new version of the Qtek 1010 (aka XDA 1 or MDA 1),
it comes with a new design and the new Microsoft Mobile
2003 OS loaded.
i-mate Overview
The i-mate is designed for mobile professionals; it is a
fairly
small Pocket PC Phone Edition, which includes SD I/O expansion slot for
memory or add-on accessories for the i-mate. Plus an optional backpack
which includes a built-in battery and a CF I/O slot for CF cards type I
and type II, plus it support VGA/CRT output.
It has wireless Bluetooth capability and features a small and
sleek
design. The name of the game is wireless control with the i-mate,
but keep in mind it does not come with built-in Wi-Fi, but you can use
an add-on SD I/O expansion slot accessory to enable Wi-Fi.
Included 64 of ROM, 128 MB of RAM and a 400 MHz X-Scale PXA263
applications processor. Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone
Edition is tweaked to take full advantage of this chipset and offer
blazing speed. However the new features with the new OS are mostly
under the covers, meaning you might be disappointed if you're looking
for a graphical revamp or new amazing features. Next year is when we'll
see the amazing upgrades that make a Pocket PC acts more like a laptop. A huge
step in the evolution of the Windows Mobile platform is going to be the support
for VGA (640x480) resolutions in both landscape and portrait modes. Microsoft
put together a nice slide show to explain the new features:
Companion
CD 1 includes Outlook 2002, ActiveSync 3.7, AvantGo, Pocket PC Games (Minesweeper,
Reversi, Hearts), Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 Series, i-mate wireless
modem driver and Links to Microsoft PPC sites
Companion
CD 2 includes IMAGINET Pocket Quran, Games (Tennis Addict, Odyssey), Ten
Ring Tones, Music, Videos and Backgrounds.
Optional accessories
It was announced by carrier devices to provide the following accessories for
i-mate:
Car
Kit
Car
Adapter
Mono
Bluetooth headset
Mono
wired hands-free headset with microphone
Thumb
Keyboard
Foldable
Keyboard
Serial
Sync Cable
USB
Sync Cable
Serial
Sync Cradle with convenient 2nd battery slot
Serial
Sync Cradle with convenient 2nd battery slot + Audio Jack and microphone
USB
Sync Cradle with convenient 2nd battery slot + Audio Jack and microphone
Stylus
Compact
Flash Sleeve +
Battery.
Other expansion capabilities
The most unique thing that the i-mate has the capability to add
on
an expansion backpack. It has the ability to handle VGA out; this
is due to the ATI video chipset inside the i-mate. The supported
resolution for LCD displays is XGA 1024x768,
VGA 800x600 and 640x480. For TV output is 640x480 NTSC and PAL system. It also
includes extended battery which can charge the main battery on the device, giving
users longer run times while using energy draining accessories like wireless
networking, or playing movies and music on long plane rides.
With the Compact Flash slot, you can use it for a wide variety
of
expansion capabilities - Digital Cameras, Bluetooth, large capacity
storage cards, GPS, analyzers.... the list goes on. And you can
do all this with the extended battery clipped on to the back.
How does it fit in my hands?
From the pictures below you can see it fits comfortably and I found that
it has no creaking or cracking when you squeeze the sides. Shaking it yields
just a very slight rattling of the battery cover which is not noticeable
at all. I will make sure to have a leather case for this device as it feels
it could slip easily from my hands.
The following picture to compare i-mate with iPAQ h5450
Wireless Capabilities
Let us start with Bluetooth. I established partnerships with
the
following devices: Sony Ericsson T610, Sony Ericsson T68i, Acer
TravelMate 341T Laptop and My personal P4 Desktop using Bluetooth ZIO
USB adapter. And finally my iPAQ h5450.
The Bluetooth Manager seems to be very simple and basic.
i-mate paired with all of them
successfully and created a partnership for each.
With both Mobile Phones (T610 and T68i) I was able to establish a GPRS
connection and surf the Internet with no hassle at all.
I tried ActiveSync via Bluetooth
and it
worked successfully. And I also established a dialup connection with my
laptop.
By discovering services on i-mate devices were able to display
two
services only Inbox for exchanging business cards and SSA where you can
use the i-mate as a modem to connect from a laptop or a desktop to
GPRS, this can be easily established with a cable, Infrared and
Bluetooth connection.
I didn’t have a Bluetooth headset to test but I saw a
demonstration
in Gitex, I can confirm that the i-mate supports Bluetooth headset
profile.
(Update December 26, 2003: BT file transfer only worked when I sent some files to my iPAQ, but I could not send from iPAQ to i-mate. Other combinations did not work with me when I tried sending and receiving using my desktop and laptop)
Phone Features
Having phone features integrated into Windows made operating
both
the PDA and the Phone lots of fun. When I started using i-mate it
prompts me for localizing settings, I can select one of the service
providers listed, such as Etisalat. The device will start customizing
GSM, GPRS, MMS, SMS, ISP settings automatically according to that
service provider, and then it will install programs which were loaded
in ROM, for i-mate they were Arabic features. This devices in not
locked to any network in the Gulf region but it has localized settings,
they can be later modified to any other service provider. This is a
triband phone not locked to any provider.
You can keep i-mate always connected to GPRS and in the same
time receive calls, MMS and SMS messages. Since this is a Class B GPRS
device, it will hold the GPRS connection if there is a call, and reactivate
it when the call ends. The phone volume is controlled separately from the
device volume, a vibrate mode can be selected also. Making a phone call
can be done from the dialer, contacts, speed dial, call history, and SIM
manager. You can answer a call by pressing the answer hardware button,
or can be rejected by the reject hardware button, a busy tone will be sent
out. When another incoming call is received the device will notify you,
if you accept you can setup conference call, you can choose to swap backwards
and forwards between 2 callers by pressing swap on the dialer. One more
feature I like is that you can take notes during a call, and after you
finish it can be saved as an attachment to the call. The phone keypad can
be locked this is a helpful feature to prevent accidental key press. I
was listening to MP3 and multitasking with no problems at all, there were
no missing frames the sound quality was really good, except that while
you are listening to a song or watching video with Windows Media Player
9 if you received a call during that i-mate will pause WMP, and when you
are finished with the phone call, it will not activate until you go to
WMP and select play in order to prevent the loud speaker from harming your
hearing. The signal quality of this phone is good, I noticed it is almost
the same as the SE T610, I believe this issue of bad reception in XDA have
been address in the XDAII i-mate.
The device has a speaker phone mode which can be enabled by holding
down the receive button until the speaker comes on, to turn it off you
can hold the same button again. I noticed that the voice quality is pretty
good, there where no noise or echoes, it was very clear even if I hold
the device 24” away from my mouth. In addition, you can interchange
your SIM card information between i-mate and another device, using SIM
manager you can transfer contacts from SIM to contacts and visa versa.
You can add photos to any contact, when the phone rings the photo
will be displayed next to the caller number, this application doesn’t
work very well, it hangs every time I try it, I guess we have to anticipate
a software update to solve this issue.(fixed
with this ROM update)
Messaging
SMS messages can be sent in different ways, from Inbox SMS account,
or from the phone dialer itself or a selected name from the contact list.
i-mate is really distinguished with its MMS capabilities, using MMS messaging
is really fun and easy to use, and it can be accessed from the today screen
as well.
The Camera
You can snap photos or shoot video clips with accompanying audio
simply by pressing the camera hardware button on the side of the device,
press once you activate the camera, the second time you press you take
a photo. File formats supported:
Still image formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG
Animation format: Animated GIF
Video formats: Motion JPEG AVI (.AVI), MPEG-4 Simple profile
(.mp4), 3GPP-H.263 baseline (.3gp)
When in Video Capture sub-mode or Image
Capture sub-mode you can press “Up” navigational button to
Zoom In the incoming video stream, each time you press the “Up” button,
the enlargement increases by 0.2. When the zoom limit has been reached
for the current mode/capture size, a beep will sound.
Utilizing SPB Benchmark from SPB Software House, You can
have the ability to compare similar machines on a common testing
software platform. I excluded benchmarks that dealt with ActiveSync and
SD Card memory speeds. Because ActiveSync speeds are directly dependent
on how many USB devices you have in the chain, if you have USB 1.1 or
USB 2.0, and how fast your particular PC is. SD/CF memory speed tests
imbed the speed of the SD/CF card itself, and really can't be extracted
from the raw results. All testing was done using a freshly hard reset
unit, with only SPB Benchmark loaded in Main Memory. The results
were then taken from the unit, and compared utilizing SPB Benchmark's
visualize capability. The resulting XML and ASP files were then
extracted to an Excel file to generate the table. Anything you see
in red denotes that the particular unit won that specific test.
i-mate Pocket PC Phone (2003, 400MHz)
Compaq iPAQ 3970 (2002, 400Mhz)
HP iPAQ h1910 (2002, 200Mhz)
HP iPAQ 5450 (2002, 400Mhz)
HP iPAQ 2215 (2003, 400Mhz)
Dell Axim X5 (2002, 400Mhz PXA250)
XDA 1, MDA 1 (2002, 200Mhz)
Toshiba e755 (2003, 400Mhz)
HP iPAQ 5550 (2003, 400Mhz)
Spb Benchmark index
1360
846
669
761
1146
752
1062
1240
1113
CPU index
1864
855
602
853
1784
912
1008
1857
1887
File system index
1065
855
627
887
1126
855
1037
1148
1063
Graphics index
1190
785
2084
491
567
434
1734
692
524
Platform index
1159
638
494
603
1204
629
881
1098
970
Write 1 MB file (KB/sec)
1255
656
447
670
1257
657
791
1263
1208
Read 1 MB file (MB/sec)
26.3
15.7
11.2
15
27
15.9
19.6
27.2
27.3
Copy 1 MB file (KB/sec)
1260
710
491
726
1262
716
790
1265
1235
Write 10 KB x 100 files (KB/sec)
859
480
372
520
905
477
540
867
776
Read 10 KB x 100 files (MB/sec)
8.55
5.36
4.24
5.15
9.78
5.26
6.45
9.71
7.34
Copy 10 KB x 100 files (KB/sec)
756
379
290
406
799
376
461
764
671
Directory list of 2000 files (thousands
of files/sec)
18.3
118
76.9
105
19.6
112
118
21
20.8
Internal database read (records/sec)
1428
380
272
618
1339
398
608
1426
1439
Graphics test: DDB BitBlt (frames/sec)
122
19.9
172
49.1
52.3
41.8
204
69.1
51.4
Graphics test: DIB BitBlt (frames/sec)
23.2
11.3
17.7
12.8
22.8
12.3
21.3
23.1
22.9
Graphics test: GAPI BitBlt (frames/sec)
136
175
325
53.7
60
47.1
217
73.5
54.5
Pocket Word document open (KB/sec)
38.5
21.3
15.5
19.9
100
22.5
32.2
37.9
36.7
Pocket Internet Explorer HTML load (KB/sec)
7.64
4.73
3.7
4.5
7.96
4.73
7.19
7.37
5.8
Pocket Internet Explorer JPEG load (KB/sec)
245
82.4
50.5
74.6
208
79.7
70.7
240
212
File Explorer large folder list (files/sec)
589
210
169
220
564
238
311
581
543
Compress 1 MB file using ZIP (KB/sec)
248
62.7
45.6
60.1
225
65.5
107
245
261
Decompress 1024x768 JPEG file (KB/sec)
612
406
268
387
606
423
322
611
604
Arkaball frames per second (frames/sec)
100
89.3
94.5
41.5
51.4
38.2
107
61.6
47.6
CPU test: Whetstones MFLOPS (Mop/sec)
0.077
0.061
0.033
0.062
0.077
0.061
0.046
0.077
0.075
CPU test: Whetstones MOPS (Mop/sec)
54.6
55.1
27.5
55.2
55.4
54.1
34.1
55.4
54.9
CPU test: Whetstones MWIPS (Mop/sec)
5.03
3.97
2.19
4.01
5.02
3.96
2.98
5.02
4.98
Memory test: copy 1 MB using memcpy (MB/sec)
108
56.2
43.7
61.9
102
65
71.3
108
110
For iPAQ h5555 and Toshiba
e755 I got
the
test results form PDAJunkie.net. As you can see the i-mate is the
overall winner. This proves that it is one of the best Pocket PCs in
the market, I have disabled Pocket Arabizer, it is preinstalled in ROM
consisting of Arabic settings such as keyboard to enable writing and
reading in Arabic. I’ve noticed that the Arabic program effects the
performance of the unit which slowing down other applications and
sometimes becoming unstable. With Arabizer disabled you can still use
other Arabic features such as the Dictionary, Prayer times, Finger
flix, Hijri Calendar and Pocket Quran.
Conclusion
The i-mate has all the features to
make
this equally a phone and a PDA all in one slim device. The new
processor with WM2003 proven to be power efficient, this contributes to
the overall battery performance. You may note I didn’t include battery
tests in this review due to a reason that it depends on the personal
usage, settings, connections and loaded applications. So I cannot
commit test results due to that reason, but I can say that I am very
impressed with the battery performance considering the fact that this
device includes wireless module always active. It even lasts longer
than my iPAQ h5450.
You will be impressed even if you
don’t
like this form factor of converged devices. Considering all the
hardware, software features and expandability options I believe this is
a leap ahead in this technology compared with all the Phone Edition
devices presently available. So is it worth the $828 ??? In my personal
opinion “Yes” because you will be spending almost the same
amount of money (or even more) to have all of these features such as a
camera, a phone and a high-end Pocket PC with this amount of internal
memory and loaded applications. Here it is all in one powerful package.
Once you try something powerful you never look back.
What’s positive
Excellent
performance and connectivity
Great
display
MMS
composing
Good
software package out of the box, including network customization
Removable
replaceable battery and good battery performance
Integrated
camera
Integrated
Bluetooth
Support
for Bluetooth headset profile
Can
be used as a modem for Internet connection from a Laptop/Desktop
Two phone buttons (Send [Yes] and
End [No]) (wake up keys) (with LED backlight)
Two programmable AP button (wake
up key)
Reset Switch
Key lock function support by software.
Notification
One Bi-color LED for GSM standby,
GSM message, GSM network status, PDA notification, PDA charging status
One blue LED for Bluetooth status
Vibration for notification
Notification by sound, message
on display.
Interface
One infrared SIR
One individual port for signals
(for USB, Serial, Car Kit, Power and Audio)
One SIM card slot
One SDIO/MMC card slot
One external antenna connector
One audio jack (2.5Ø diameter)
Bluetooth
Bluetooth 1.1 compliant
Power class 2
Support profiles: SerialPort profile,
Dial-up Networking profile, Headset profile and Generic Objects Exchange
profile.
CMOS Camera
Color
Resolution: VGA (480 x 640)
Audio
Loudspeaker
Receiver
Microphone
Polyphonic MIDI ring
tone (16+ chords)
WAV/WMA/MP3 stereo
Power
Battery
i) Removable and rechargeable lithium-ion Polymer battery,1,200mAh (typical)
Data retention time: 72 hours
ii) Separate backup battery (25mAh, rechargeable) Data retention time: 20 to
30 mins (based on full capacity)
iii) Battery lock mechanism for
removable battery
Battery life
(typical 64MB SDRAM)
i) PDA mode: 12 hours
ii) Talk: 2.5 to 3.5 hours
iii) Standby: 160 hours
AC Adapter
i) AC input:100 to 240 VAC, 50/60Hz
ii) AC Input Current: 0.2A AC Max
iii) DC Output rating: 5VDC
iv) DC Output Current: 2A
Standard Cradle
USB Cable between cradle and PC
2nd Battery charging
slot
LED indicator for 2nd battery charging
Accessories
Bundle
i) Stylus
ii) Stereo wired hands-free headset with microphone
iii) AC Adapter with Power Plug
iv) Carry Case
v) USB Sync Cradle with 2nd battery slot
vi) User Manual, Quick Start Guide, Sync Software
Options (examples of some items
available)
i) Serial Sync Cable
ii) USB Sync Cable
iii) Serial Sync Cradle with 2nd battery slot
iv) Serial Sync Cradle with 2nd battery slot + Audio jack and microphone
v) USB Sync Cradle with 2nd battery slot + Audio jack and microphone
vi) Car Adapter
vii) Car Kit
viii) Mono wired hands-free headset with microphone
ix) Mono Bluetooth head-set
x) Thumb Keyboard
xi) Foldable Keyboard
xii) Backpack: CF type II + VGA Out (within cable) + Battery
Standard Applications
Microsoft® Pocket Outlook;
Inbox, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks
