HTC S710 review: Windows Mobile 6 (See all reviews)

We find the 2.4" 65K color TFT display of the HTC S710 satisfactory. It's extremely sharp, has great color but with low legibility under direct sunlight, especially when it has fingerprint smudges all over. As have already mentioned, sliding out the keyboard will automatically switch the screen to landscape orientation.

The HTC S710 is powered by a 200 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 850 processor and runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard. The S710 was the first model the company offered on the market to run the newer Windows Mobile 6 Standard edition.

Windows Mobile 6 is more of an incremental update to Windows Mobile 5, rather than a complete overhaul. The whole system looks a little more modernized, though we still believe that other smartphone operating systems look far nicer and even work better in many cases.

As a default, the home screen shows system information, shortcuts for recently used applications and active stand-by screen that shows other information, for instance, upcoming events, active profile and message status. It can be personalized by themes to look completely different and several Windows variants are quite nice. The possibilities for personalization are almost endless.

The main menu is shown as a grid of 3х3 icons and is thankfully now scrollable instead of having to go through the menu page by page. Speed dials and voice tags can be assigned to each application, and the numeric keypad is linked to each menu item. Most menus beyond the Start menu are list-based, with the right softkey generally bringing up a popup list of options for the current screen, and the left confirming selections.

The Comm manager will let you control all of the various connectivity functions of your phone. You can set the phone to Flight mode, turn the Wi-Fi on or off, turn push Email on or start Activesync for getting the phone synchronized with your PC.

In the Settings tab you have plenty of options to choose from and change. Everything from the profiles, sounds, background image, power, security and regional settings can be changed plus the Windows Update function to help keep your phone running smoothly.

The File Explorer is the mobile version of Windows Explorer and it helps you to explore the content of both and card memory. You can rename files, copy, sort, delete, make new folders or send the files as email attachments. There is also a Bluetooth explorer to help you browse other handsets as if they were a network share. This makes moving files a lot easier.

As for Memory, the handset has the usual 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of flash ROM, of which approximately 50 MB are free for your use. Should you need more storage space you can use an up to 2 GB microSD card. The task manager can be to display what programs are currently running in the background. This can help to speed up your phone if you find that one application is using all of the phone’s resources or memory