News Story

XDA II touch base

Peter Scott, Wednesday 7 Jul 2004

So, I had a chance to try out the O2 XDA II for a couple of days and thought it worth a short report. The workshop I was doing for the E2BN conference needed a few of these beasties to work – so we hired half a dozen.

A neat idea this wee smartphone, it has a WinCE 2003 interface that connects well to the GSM and GPRS O2 phone services. Best of all, as WinCE it supports Flash – and so it runs Hexagon and our other apps just fine. It was very interesting to be *genuinely* unwired for data with some of our apps, for a shortwhile…

As a phone it is a tad slow and painful; but it has a very neat camera that takes some very decent pictures (for a pda/phone)! What it lacks is a cam pointing forward (one that is available to the browser, and therefore hex); and wifi so that it can switch to a faster / cheaper network than GPRS when a hotspot is available. Word on the street is that is pretty much what is planned for the vIII release, later this year – plus a slide out keyboard, of course. I wouldn&#39t hold my breath for the wifi – as it must conflict with the phone net business model, but the others are likely…