We drooled over Dopod’s massively-featured, tiny P800W back in May. Shortly afterwards we were sent the 3G version, the Dopod D810 but we didn’t want to review this Windows Mobile 5-based phone then: the onboard GPS wasn’t activated. Now, however, parent company HTC has released a free WM6 update and installing it both ends the Dopod brand name and turns the D810 into the HTC p3600i. What it lacks in name it more than makes up for in features.

Like the P800W it has a GPS receiver, 802.11g WiFi, Bluetooth, two-megapixel camera, 64MB RAM and 128MB Flash memory. MiniUSB handsfree headphones are included, but there’s no windscreen mount yet. It’s 3G (with HSDPA) and has a second, front-mounted camera for video calls. The fiddly microSD card, housed beneath the SIM card, is replaced by a more practical miniSD card which fits in to a slot at the side.

The move to WM6 brings with it some tweaks – handwriting recognition is improved for one. The processor is also upped from 200MHz to 400MHz making applications, especially GPS software, zip along noticeably faster. But this hasn’t affected battery life: the p3600i’s battery is physically twice the size of the lasts-forever P800W’s and has a staggering standby time of eight days and talk time of over four hours. In real life it lasted for a week, when testing, which included some Google mapping, TV watching and two hours of TomTom GPS navigation – very impressive.

The shiny black casing is a fingerprint magnet but it looks sleeker. It’s a similar size: 108mm high, 18mm thick and weighs only 150g. The camera is grainy in low light and GPS software isn’t included but it’s compatible with 3’s X-Series applications (except Skype, for now) and is one of the most impressive and well-featured devices we’ve ever seen. Price depends on which 3 plan you choose. The Nokia E61 remains on the A-List because its keyboard and business email compatibilities, but this is a great alternative if you want a WM6 PDA phone.