I’ve had it said to me on more than one occasion that Windows Mobile phones are all the same. Sure they look different; some have hardware keyboards and some plain numeric, but there’s nothing radical under the hood. It’s still dour old Microsoft powering the show, with even the latest version of its mobile operating system beginning to show its age now that Apple has shown its hand and Google has begun to muscle in.

There’s no denying that Microsoft desperately needs to revamp its mobile operating system, but the effect of this isn’t all bad. Its inertia has forced handset manufacturers to take the lead and as a result we’ve seen a constant stream of hardware innovations over the past two years or so: GPS, HSDPA, touch-sensitive and high-resolution screens are commonplace now, and bundled software extras are also an area where manufacturers seek to stand out.

With i-mate’s latest business email companion – the Ultimate 8150 – the innovation is somewhat more unusual. On the outside it looks pretty standard stuff – but on the right side is an unusual socket that hints at something slightly different. This smartphone can be hooked up to an external monitor. The ability comes courtesy of nVidia’s GoForce 5500 graphics chip, which allows output of resolutions up to 1024 x 768 and it works rather splendidly. Using a special cable supplied in the box, which also carries audio, you simply hook the 8150 up to a spare D-SUB socket on your monitor and then switch between external and built in screens as you would on a full blown notebook. Cunningly, once you switch to the external output the touch screen on the 8150 turns into a touchpad and you use it to control a cursor on screen in much the same way as you would on a notebook.

The target audience of such a feature is, of course, the mobile presenter – it offers the opportunity to travel light and yet still be able to display basic slideshows. But contractors could also find a use for it. While you’re out on-site, with the addition of a Bluetooth fold away keyboard, it turns any spare monitor into a mini workstation. In fact, just to prove a point, I wrote the entirety of this review on the 8150 hooked up in just this way.

XGA output is certainly an interesting, potentially useful feature, and there aren’t any other smartphones I can think of that can offer such functionality. But unfortunately the 8150 can’t back this innovation up elsewhere. To start with, it’s a pretty chunky phone, even by Windows Mobile standards. The screen isn’t that big at 2.6in, but with a half centimetre surround, the phone is larger than it needs to be. It’s equipped with a standard, mechanical numeric keypad below it, but it’s absolutely huge – again, bigger than necessary – with super-wide number keys stretching across the full width of the phone’s chassis.

The styling won’t be to everyone’s tastes – it looks more like a military accessory than a modern consumer techno fashion accessory, with its matt-black plastic stealth finish, blue LEDs and bombproof build quality – and a real ugly duckling when compared with the Glofiish phones I reviewed recently.

And the usability doesn’t impress that much either. I’d like to say that those massive buttons on the numeric keypad made the phone easier to use than those on a standard-sized handset, but I can’t. They’re stiff, not particularly responsive to press and trying to use them to tap out short text messages and email is a nightmare because you can’t seem to hit two in quick succession and get the 8150 to reliably recognise both key presses. The way the numbers are printed on the keys doesn’t help here – the left column of buttons has the numerals printed right next to the boundary with the central column and in dark conditions this makes it all too easy to press the wrong key.

That said, there are some saving graces, and you can’t deny that the Ultimate 8150 lives up to its name. It packs in plenty of power, for instance, with an XScale PXA 270 520MHz processor inside and a good helping of RAM (128MB) and ROM (256MB). Data connections are fast too, with HSDPA, 3G and GPRS with EDGE to ensure lightning quick downloads and browsing. Plus you get an FM tuner, Wi-Fi, a two megapixel camera with light and portrait mirror, plus a front-facing VGA camera. The only thing missing is a GPS receiver.

And, apart from that horrid keypad, some of the other controls are quite nicely thought out. The mini joystick embedded in the numeric keypad, for instance, works well for navigating around the Windows Mobile 6 interface, as does the jog wheel on the left edge. The addition of a button on the side dedicated to launching the Wireless Manager is a nice touch too.

I also like the fact that the 8150 can be charged up very quickly. Put it in ‘fast charge’ mode and it’s replenished in a couple of hours or so. Unfortunately, the battery life itself brings it all back down to earth with a resounding bump. The seemingly capacious 1,530mAh was rarely good enough for a day or so of occasional use. In the three weeks I used the phone I never managed to extract more than two days from it, and this was without Bluetooth or the Wi-Fi adaptor switched on.

Verdict

The i-mate Ultimate 8150 certainly crams in plenty of features – it’s fast all round and jammed full of the latest smartphone goodies. Plus there’s that rather unusual extra of being able to output to an external monitor or projector.

But features aren’t everything when it comes to phones, and the size, design, and battery life of this one are not up to scratch. If you desperately want the display output it’s pretty much unique. If you don’t, the TyTN II still rivals it for features but in a smaller, much more usable package, whereas those from Glofiish are vastly more stylish.

Review Video:

Summary

We are very impressed at mPhone with this I-Mate SmartPhone. It is one of the best SmartPhones on the market. The SP3 comes with an enhanced user interface, reduced size, at the same time keeping all the expected functionality of a SmartPhone.

What is the SmartPhone 3 (SP3)?

SP3 Size

The SmartPhone 3 is more than a simple upgrade. The new chassis is smaller, thinner and lighter than previous SmartPhones. Impressively, the chassis still captures the large range of buttons we have come to expect from SmartPhones.

Display

The SP3 includes a 2.1″ colour screen which is the same size as the SmartPhone 2. It is of much better quality though, with good colour reproduction and sharp picture.

Connectivity

The SP3 has a standard USB port. Meaning the phone can be synchronised with a PC using the supplied cable. This method can also be used for charging the phone. Although, some people may prefer the cradle supplied with the SP2. A separate UK power adaptor is also provided (as standard) so you can also charge your phone when away from your PC.

Memory

The 64MB of internal memory should be more than enough room for storing personal information, pictures and video clips. However, should you start to run out there is a mini memory card slot. Unfortunately, its located under the battery, meaning the phone has to be turned off to remove or replace it. mPhone offer these reduced size SDs. They are listed under the SP3 SIM Free.

New SP3 Operating System (OS)

It is not just the outside that has had a overhaul, the Operating System has been upgraded to Windows Mobile 2003 2nd edition. Not much has changed in comparison to the SP2, but the interface is a bit better in terms of clarity and is easier to select the common features such as MSN messenger, email, contacts, and the personal diary.

Texting has been dramatically improved with the keypad better labelled. It is now easier to write longer compositions such as emails.

Control

Thankfully, the SP2 joystick has been replaced by a unique and user-friendly button scroller. This offers much enhanced performance and control.

SP3 Camera

As with most phones today, the SP3 comes with a camera to a maximum resolution of 640×680. It can not compete with a dedicated digital camera but adds allows for the odd snap shot to be taken then sent by email, MMS or downloaded to the PC.

SmartPhone Applications

New applications are also included, such as file and task manager.

mPhone Rating:

Overall we give the SmartPhone 3 (SP3) a rating of 4 out of 5.

Positive: Small size, long lasting battery, great interface

Negative: Memory card slot is difficult to access.

Design
The i-Mate K-JAM, on first glance, appears to look much like any other touchscreen smartphone; a simple set of dialling buttons surrounding a five-way selector underneath a 2.8-inch, 240×320 pixel display, which would lead you to suspect that it utilises a naff touchscreen for all of its typing activities. Those who have used other i-mate products — most notably the i-mate JASJAR won’t be too surprised to find that the K-JAM hides a QWERTY keyboard, although unlike the JASJAR, there’s no facility to flip and spin the screen; it instead simply slides out on the vertical axis, like some kind of slider phone experiment flipped through 90 degrees. When the keyboard is slid out, the display likewise flips through 90 degrees and becomes an instantly more business-document-friendly widescreen aspect ratio. The keyboard itself is understandably very small — fitting into a 108 by 58 by 23.7 millimetre frame doesn’t afford you a lot of key space to begin with — but reasonably responsive, and certainly good enough for typing out quick messages, responding to emails or simple document editing. The rear of the K-JAM houses a 1.3-megapixel digital camera, the battery casing, which is locked into position, and the stylus which sits at the base of the K-JAM body, next to the USB port which serves double duty as a data and charging port.

Like the JASJAR, the visual design of the K-JAM is on the plain side, which is presumably meant to entice IT departments into buying shedloads of the things. With its bulky shape and fairly hefty carrying weight of 160 grams, this isn’t a phone to bring out to impress your pub mates, although it’s conceivable you might get the odd envious glance from within the corporate boardroom while weilding one.

Features
The phone portion of the K-JAM is, like many modern smartphones, quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) designed for cross-planet roaming wherever you can get an actual mobile signal. It’s also equipped with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), miniSD and the aforementioned USB port for data transfers, as well as an infrared port for talking to truly ancient phones.

On the smartphone side, the K-JAM packs in 128MB of ROM and 64MB of SDRAM; that’s a touch on the low side, although it could be supplanted with a miniSD card. It’s somewhat meagre Texas Instruments OMAP 850 200MHz processor runs Windows Mobile 5.0, which gives you access to a raft of productivity applications, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook, along with slightly less business-centric applications such as Media Player, Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger.

Performance
i-Mate rates the K-JAM’s 1250mAh Lithium Ion battery as being good for between 3.5-5 hours of talk time and between 150-200 hours of standby time. Our testing revealed figures slightly lower than that, although we’re used to seeing phone manufacturer stated figures sit on the optimistic side. On a moderately heavy usage profile we were able to keep the K-JAM up and running for around four days in between charges. That was with relatively low wireless and Bluetooth usage; you could expect to halve that (or worse) if you were a heavy data pusher. We did like the fact that the phone charges from any USB connection, including when it’s plugged in for data transfers.

On the application side, the K-JAM performed at what we’d deem an acceptable level for a smartphone, but never really swiftly, which we’d put down to the comparatively weak 200MHz processor at its core. It was most noticeable when using the camera functionality; while most camera phones are particularly built for opportunity-based snapshots, the four to five seconds you’ll have to wait for the camera to fire up will render most such opportunities with the K-JAM wasted.

The K-JAM is currently available at a lower asking price than the JASJAR — that’s hardly surprising, given the somewhat lower specification screen, lack of 3G support and much less grunty processor, and for what it offers is good value in a very competitive smartphone space.

Review Video:

IMate have released a brace of products in recent weeks but his on the iMate JasJar is the one we’ve been waiting for, not only has it a unique folding clamshell design and a picot system more akin with a tablet PC but it also runs on the latest Windows Mobile 5.0 platform.

iMate have pitched the JasJar at the mobile professional and clearly its main competitor has to be the Nokia communicator range, it’s not a small device measuring 81 x 127.7 x 25mm and tipping our scales at over 285 grams. The closest real life object we can relate the JasJar to is the older Psion Series 5 palmtops, its a big heavy beast but it’s aiming to stop you needing your laptop although so on that basis we’ll forgive it’s dimensions.

The heart of the iMate JasJar is a 520Mhz Intel processor which is paired with 128mb of RAM providing the engine for Windows latest incarnation of their mobile platform, this suits the 3.6″ TFT screen will especially it’s 640 x 480 pixel resolution. You can switch the interface between portrait and landscape modes at the press of a button or by rotating the pivoting screen as seen in most tablet PC’s, however this does seem to take quite some time for the OS to sort itself out and resume normal operation.

Living with the phone for a week was a mixed bag, you get all the toys that the busy exec could wish for any using it in clamshell mode makes for a suitable small laptop replacement for sending a receiving emails and even browsing web pages, although we did find it best to use WAP designed pages. The inbuilt WiFi is a most welcome extra but we have to ask why it’s only 802.11b and not .11g? Too much to ask for that extra speed? at least the iMate WiFi tool is easy to use and has a nice feature which disables the WiFi if its without signal for a pre determined time thus saving you battery.

Battery life was very impressive, we had feared that using the full feature set (WiFi and Bluetooth) would really dent iMates claimed 10 day standby and 8 hour talk time. However we managed around 2 days between charges with serious use of WiFi and leaving Bluetooth permanently switched on. using the JasJar as a normal mobile we found that the Tri bands reception was good if not stunning and it managed to hold onto most calls giving an OK RF performance. Call quality isn’t 1st class but more than ok, the weird thing we found was a 3 second delay when taking calls from flipping the phone open (or twisting it round) to actually answering the call, we thoughts that the 520Mhz processor would have been quicker than this.

The basic office mobility features work very well email is great when using iMates push email service and find yourself a WiFi hotspot and you could almost be sat in the office, the WiFi connection seemed to perform as well as most PDA’s and our own WiFi card equipped iMate Jam, you can use WEP encryption too. The processing power of the iMate was plenty to play MP3 files while accessing a word document with an excel sheet open at the same time, the MP3 files were stored on an SD card which was tucked into the slot.

Using the JasJar keyboard proved easy and difficult at the same time, there is a full Qwerty keyboard but the keys are just too tightly packed together for anything more than 2 finger typing, that said we managed to get quite proficient and this is one of the few devices we’ve used where the stylus stayed firmly in its storage slot. The screen is a joy to use and the 180 degree swivel feature means you can find a comfy position to use it even when resting is those ergonomically challenging airline seats.

We had a play with a few other applications like the video calling, using a 3G network we were able to take advantage of the JasJar’s 2 cameras, using the forward facing one we were able to have one of those wonderfully jerky video calls with a colleague. We also tried the Skype client that is pre loaded onto the device, strangely despite a number of attempts and trips to the settings menu we just couldn’t get it to play ball, which is even stranger as our iMate Jam works a treat saving pounds by using data and VOIP instead of paying for roaming charges.

Like all Windows Mobile devices you can rely on either Bluetooth, Infrared or USB 1.1 and use active sync to push data, emails and services like Avantgo to your device, this does feel a bit like the dark ages but the mini USB jack can prove very useful. You can go wild customising your desktop and the complete look and feel of the interface and the revised version 2005 of the Windows OS is certainly one of the key selling points of the device, if only it was as stylish on the outside, we have to say its one of the plainer devices we’ve had in the office this year.

When you are shelling out £649 for your iMate JasJar you do have to think carefully about your needs and if you are willing to carry such a heavy device around with you. We certainly regretted having it when we only wanted a phone, its just not an option to take it on a night out or to tuck it into a jacket pocket, this is a bit of kit for the serious road warrior only or for those who are ditching that “travel laptop”.

Overall iMate do have a winner here and one that we’d choose over the Nokia range, however there is a health warning, make sure you are prepared to cart it around before you buy!

Review Video:

It’s a sad fact that much of the tech on sale these days is still targeted at men. Many smartphones, laptops, PCs, sat-nav devices seem very masculine, not only because they’re toys and fun to play with, but because of the way they’re designed.

Take my wife (come on, it’s Christmas, I’m allowed one Les Dawson gag…): whenever I wave a new gadget at her with a silly grin on my face that says “isn’t this cool?”, the response is normally distinctly luke warm. “It’s too masculine,” she moans, a criticism that, just recently, has been aimed firmly at the smartphones I’ve had in for review.

When you sit down and think about it, she’s right, of course. They’re usually quite big, squarish and grey or black. Even the names are macho: the X600, the 503G, the TyTN II (for pity’s sake!)… you get the picture. So it’s refreshing to see something that elicits something different to the wrinkled-up nose and look of disdain. I’m talking about i-Mate’s latest BlackBerry-style smartphone, the Jama 201.

It’s easy to see why. Though the Jama is still clad in rather masculine black clothes, and has a pretty geeky-sounding name, it’s very, very slim. At 14mm thick it’s only a touch thicker than a biro, and it’s not too wide (63mm), tall (113mm) or heavy (152g) either. Despite the fact that it’s the same size on paper as the BlackBerry 8800 this just feels slimmer – in fact the closest phone I can think of to the 201 in terms of pocketability (or should I say handbag friendliness) is Samsung’s i600, but this i-Mate beats it hands down in terms of its chic appeal.

The 201 is also a very tactile device. The whole chassis is coated in that lovely rubbery, soft-touch plastic which, as well as feeling soft and smooth under your fingertips, also means when you’re typing away on its QWERTY keyboard it feels secure in your hands, unlike a number of soap-bar phones I could mention.

In terms of ease of use, these compact dimensions could have an impact, but surprisingly, i-Mate has done a decent job here as well. The keyboard is absolutely tiny and smaller than that on a BlackBerry 8800, for instance, and, if you’ve got big, builder’s thumbs, likely to be rather difficult to use. But I found that, once I’d got used to the size of the keys, typing short email messages and texts was surprisingly easy. The square keys have just enough space between them to prevent you accidentally striking neighbouring characters, and they have a positive click to them that means you know exactly when you’ve pressed or not pressed a key successfully. It can’t match the superb design of the BlackBerry 8800’s keyboard, but it’s not that far behind in its usability.

The button cluster above the keyboard and below the 320 x 240, 2.4in screen, is also reasonably well done. All the keys are well-labelled and are easy yet firm to click – just like the keys on the keyboard. The five-way d-pad is a touch fiddly, and again can’t match the 8800s scrolling ‘pearl’, but it’s by no means awful. I’ve used a lot worse than this.

Where the Jama 201 is not strong as I’d like, however, is on the features front. Most notable among the omissions is the lack of 3G or HSDPA internet; you’re stuck with GPRS with EDGE for browsing the internet and downloading email. It doesn’t sound like much, but try downloading attachments larger than a few Kb – a PDF file, for instance, and you’ll quickly become frustrated.

It’s just a tri-band phone too, with no support for the 850 GSM band so you can’t use the phone in the US if your business happens to take you there. And you don’t get the luxury extras you do with the flagship BlackBerry phones or other top-end handelds. There’s Bluetooth, but it’s not the faster version 2.0. There’s no GPS receiver, nor is there a Wi-Fi adaptor, and the paucity of advanced features extends to a bog-standard 2.0 megapixel digital camera, which is equipped with neither a flash nor a self-portrait mirror. It looks positively stone-age next to a TyTN II and even Samsung’s i600 which has been around some time now and boasts HSDPA where this has none.

Finally, the 201 is powered by a rather weedy-looking 300MHz Samsung processor, coupled with 128MB of ROM and 64MB of RAM. It doesn’t make for the snappiest-feeling performance when switching from application to application, but contacts lookups in my large test database, which contains more than 500 entries, are pretty much instantaneous.

There is an upside to the lack of features though. Sticking to just GPRS instead of the more power-hungry 3G and HSDPA connection, seems to contribute to impressive battery life. Despite the seemingly low capacity 1,110mAh lithium ion battery and rather average-sounding quoted four hours talktime and 150 hours standby, I found that a single charge went a long way with the Jama 201 – further than with my favoured TyTN II. I was able to go three to four days out of it at a time, and that includes making frequent phone calls, browsing the internet and picking up email from my Exchange Server.

Verdict

But despite the fact that my wife doesn’t think it’s bad, the i-Mate Jama 201 isn’t all things to all men and women. It’s well designed, slim, light and in general a pleasant device to use. The keyboard is good, making typing out emails and SMS messages a simple task and battery life is top drawer.

If all you want is a decent qwerty keyboard for messaging and the odd bit of internet browsing, it’s a competent device. But for me it’s lacking in just too many other areas to compete with the latest smartphones on the market. No HSDPA or 3G, no GPS, no quad-band GSM and no decent camera mean that, despite a reasonable price, it fails to gain the Trusted Reviews seal of approval.

Review Video: