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HTC MDA Review - Introduction & Design



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Fareed
Posted on Tuesday, May 30, 2006
by Fareed, Cell Phone Editor
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Introduction & Design

Editor Rating: 4.8
5 
5 
The HTC Wizard is a brilliant Pocket PC with advanced features and capabilities.  The Wizard is made by High Tech Corporation (HTC). Although HTC makes the phone, it is branded by many other companies. The HTC Wizard is also known as the Qtek 9100, I-Mate K-Jam, o2 XDA , T-Mobile MDA etc. Although it is branded by different companies the actual phone is the same, but the branded OS may be different. For example, in this review I used my I-Mate K-Jam, which has I-Mate branding software.

The Wizard has an exceptional design that looks like any other Pocket PC, but what makes it different is what is hidden beneath: a full QWERTY keyboard. The Wizard has an amazing horizontal slider keyboard.  When the keyboard is extended, the screen also rotates to give you a widescreen landscape view. The 240 x 320 touch screen is excellent for viewing web pages, watching videos, or just using it to view your Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. The Wizard is far more than just a cell phone, it is a mini computer with a 200 Mhz processor, WIFI, Bluetooth, expandable 2 GB memory and much, much more. 

QWERTY Keyboard 

The Wizard’s design is exceptional, an innovation built on top of phones with sliding capabilities. The older version is the HTC Harrier, which also had a QWERTY keyboard but was not practical at all. The phone’s keyboard would slide out vertically like all other slider phones. What makes the HTC Wizard so magnificent is that the QWERTY keyboard slides out horizontally which makes it easier to hold, easier to use, and much better for viewing web pages. Also the screen rotates as the keyboard is out which makes viewing on the Pocket PC that much more convenient.

The phone has hot keys everywhere and most of them can be assigned to your preference. There is a button for text messages and if you keep pressing it toggles through all your email, POP3 accounts, MMS messages etc. Adjacent to the message button is the Internet Explorer button, which comes in very handy when you need to access the web and do not want to pull out the stylus. On the left side of the phone there is a Comm manager button which lets you access the WIFI, Bluetooth, ActiveSync and toggle between vibrate and ringer. The button on the opposite side is a voice dialing button and when held can be used to close programs. Overall the design of the Wizard is brilliant, and it took a lot of thorough planning.      

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Companies: HTC,  T-Mobile
Phones: HTC MDA

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