You’d be forgiven for not having heard of Dopod but its parent company, HTC, makes smart phones which HP, i-mate, O2 and T-Mobile re-badge. Dopod is HTC’s new own brand.
We saw Mio’s DigiWalker A701 three month’s ago and were impressed at how a smartphone could include integrated GPS. The D800W blows it out of the water in terms of hardware and features. It’s 20g lighter and far less bulky at only 17mm thick. Despite being a fully-featured PDA phone with a 2.8in, 240 x 320pixel, transflective screen, it feels the size of a standard phone. A high-quality stylus slots in the bottom and navigation is aided by a 360° scroll wheel, a small trackball and six navigation and phone answer keys surrounding them. At the sides are shortcut buttons for the 2-megapixel camera, voice recorder and volume. Wired connectivity is via mini-USB.
It’s remarkably well built and feels great in the hand. Most navigation requires a stylus but such is the price of diminutive dimensions. The Dopod has barely a feature missing: it supports quad band GSM and supports EDGE data transfer, 802.11g WiFi is supported as is BlueTooth 2. There’s even an FM radio which uses the bundled, wired, USB handsfree kit as an antenna. But the crowning glory is an integrated GPS receiver. Expansion is possible via a microSD card but one isn’t included. Fortunately a 1GB model costs only $22 from www.centre.net.au and you’ll need it for multimedia files and GPS maps.
It didn’t stop impressing us. The battery life was great. Using 3D navigation it directed us for just over 2hrs without needing a recharge. Moderate use (with some GPS navigation) over a weekend saw the battery deplete only 50%. Dopod states that standby time is over a week while talk time is up to five hours – claims which held up in our tests.
It’s not all great though. The camera is mediocre – the lens is very soft, colour transitions can be harsh and barrel distortion is obvious (though we did like the ability to attach GPS coordinates to pictures). Also, Dopod’s recommended GPS software, Maction PaPaGo 7, is only modest, though Ryda’s premium for bundling it is only $90. Of course you’re free to save this money and buy something better like CoPilot’s Live software for $195 from
www.travroute.com.
As well as the handsfree kit, Dopod bundles a windscreen mount and cigarette-lighter charger. In our testing it always got us where we wanted, though the small screen sometimes got very crowded. All initial setting up must be done with the stylus, though once you’re up and running, you can jab the screen with a podgy finger and reroute or change the viewpoint. The 200MHz processor doesn’t make the display as smooth as other GPS devices, and automatic rerouting can take a while, but we never got lost.
All in all the D800W is a great product. At its heart is a responsive phone which can be used without a stylus, but it’s so much more. It might not offer the push email clients of our cheaper, A-Listed smartphones, but the operating system lets you easily add some. We’ve often lamented the necessity of carrying around multiple devices but the D800W can actually lay claim to being one device which rules them all.