Monday, January 15, 2007
Let's Glofiishing with the X500
Posted by Darius Wey in "HARDWARE" @ 06:00 AM
The X500 Has the EDGE
When E-TEN's M600 first entered the market, it was generally well received as one of just a few quad-band GSM Pocket PC Phones around. Of course, this made it suitable for roaming, but for every positive, there's a negative. The M600 was crippled with limited data support (GPRS only; no EDGE).
E-TEN's recent release of the Glofiish X500 changed all that. The company realized the M600's shortcomings and gave the X500 the love of EDGE, while retaining the solid quad-band GSM support the M600 was well-known for. With EDGE's increased data and subscriber capacity, everything is golden, right? By today's standards, not really. In this day and age, you'd have to be living under a rock to realize that 3G is growing at a rapid rate. When rumours were circulating in the middle of 2006 that E-TEN had a couple of new products ready for an end of year release, there was hope that they would be 3G-capable, though as we now know from the specifications of the recently-released X500 and M700, that was not to be. Perhaps we'll see E-TEN make amends in its next-generation Glofiish devices.
What's In the Box?
From all angles, the X500 box is covered with a splash of purple, which works well with the prominent orange theme of the Glofiish series. The old E-TEN branding is noticeably absent, which suggests the company's intentions to give its new and upcoming Pocket PCs their own identity, much like what Microsoft has done with the Zune.
Figure 1: The purple and orange X500 box.
Upon opening the box, the X500 is clearly visible through a clear plastic window. Bundled with it are a number of accessories and documentation:
These will be covered in greater detail as we progress through the review.
M600 + G500 = X500?
In many ways, the X500 can be seen as a combination of its predecessors, the M600 and G500, and then some more. The X500 retains the blazing performance of the M600 with its 400MHz processor, and its strong wireless connectivity via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The X500 then borrows the G500's embedded SiRFstar III chipset and TMC support to boast GPS capabilities, and similarly goes the extra mile to feature an FM radio with RDS support. All of that, and a 2.0-megapixel camera with a flash, packed into a slim shell and it appears that we have a winner in our hands. But is it? Following an examination of design, software, and performance, we'll proceed to answer that question.
- Discuss this story [10 replies]
- Permalink
