O2 seems ready to sell cheaper iPhones this summer which only indicates that a third-generation iPhone will arrive. The 8GB iPhone 3G is currently being sold for free with £44.05 a month contracts while the 16GB version is free only with £73.41 a month contracts.

Starting this summer, the 8GB will be free with £35 a month contracts and the 16GB will be free on £45 tariffs. Will we see cheaper iPhones outside the UK too? If all goes well and Apple will launch a new iPhone this year then O2’s initiative might be copied by others too. But don’t get all excited folks, these are all rumors for now.

Design
If you’re going give a product the suffix of “Stealth”, then it’s fair to expect a few things. It should probably be somewhat undetectable, for a start, although probably not completely invisible. A completely invisible phone would drive you insane, as you’d be able to hear it ringing on your desk but not actually find it, and even if you did, working out which buttons were which would still stymie you. No, instead O2’s using “stealth” to presumably point out that the Xda Stealth looks somewhat like a chubby slider phone when powered down, and it’s only when you flick the screen on that you realise it’s also a fully functional Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone with the usual touchscreen features. As smartphones go it’s on the smaller side at 110 by 53 by 22.5 millimetres and 140 grams, but in a slider world rich with phones like the LG KG800 and Samsung D900, this is still a Kirstie Alley to their Kate Moss slender style.

The unslid portion of the Xda Stealth comprises selection buttons, calling buttons, a four way directional pad with a small enter key and, of course, the touchscreen above, which is a 2.4-inch 320×240 display. Underneath the sliding portion sit backlit dialling buttons in standard array. As with most of O2’s range, charging is performed via USB, either with a PC cable or the supplied AC charger. The USB socket is located at the bottom of the phone. It took us some time to work out where the Xda Stealth’s stylus was located — perhaps that’s the reasoning behind the stealth moniker. It sits in a groove at the base, just next to the USB charger, for what it’s worth.

Features
As a phone, the Xda Stealth is a tri-band (GSM900/1800/1900) phone with 192MB of flash ROM and 64MB of RAM, alongside a side-mounted miniSD card slot. Those with a particular phone tech fetish will no doubt care that it’s running an Intel XScale processor at 416Mhz. Wireless connectivity runs the gamut of 802.11g (and thus 802.11b by default) as well as Bluetooth. The 2-megapixel camera located on the rear of the Xda Stealth is a nice inclusion, although as it’s not a 3G compatible phone, you’ll only be using it for happy snaps or the odd bit of grainy video shooting.

On the smartphone front, the Xda Stealth runs on Windows Mobile 5.0, with capabilities for push e-mail, office document viewing, Web browsing and, of course, playing Bubble Breaker. One nice add-on feature that the Xda Stealth includes is a virtual answering machine, designed to save fees on mobile phone voicemail services. When activated, it’ll automatically intercept all incoming calls, play a user-recorded file and then save the calls as Windows Media Audio files, rather than leaving them with your telco. It’s a nice software addition that we could see annoying plenty of telcos if the idea spreads.

Performance
On the phone front we only had a few problems with the Xda Stealth. While it in theory offers the option of either touchscreen or dialling pad for calling numbers, we found a few instances — such as entering SIM security codes — where it completely ignored the dialling pad. To make matters worse, it gave us no error messages to indicate we should only use the touchscreen, leaving us wondering why we were getting no signal all of a sudden. Battery life wasn’t all that exceptional, with the phone requiring recharging every two days during our test period under moderate usage. Expect that figure to dive if you use the integrated wireless or Bluetooth functionality often.

On the Windows Mobile front we were mostly satisfied with the Stealth, but never entirely happy. On the plus side, while its offering of applications isn’t that much different from any other smartphone, they all worked reasonably quickly and well. On the minus side, as with other touchscreen specific smartphones, long text entry is still something of a chore. We also quickly found it prudent to keep the Stealth locked at all times, as it had the disconcerting habit of launching applications while it was sitting flat on a desk. Hopefully a future firmware upgrade will fix that particular quirk.

Our biggest concerns with the XDA Stealth were, however, outside of its functions as a phone or PDA, and more centered on the phone’s physical design. Once we found the unit’s stylus, we were rather disconcerted to discover that the nub of the stylus fell off very easily. Our opinion of the XDA Stealth wasn’t improved when it managed this trick while trying to get the stylus out of the phone, whereupon we had to use a pen to wedge the stylus out. This could be a function of our particular review model having been treated badly by other reviewers, but it doesn’t bode well for the durability of the unit as a whole. Then there’s the display screen. At 2.4 inches (6cm), it’s relatively generous by slider phone standards — but quite small by smartphone standards. When you combine that with the physical size of the Stealth, sitting between the uber-slim sliders and the bigger, chunkier Blackberry-style smartphones, you end up with a phone that’s perhaps not quite as easy to use as it should be.

Review Video:

It has been so prolific in the past year or so that you could be forgiven for thinking – or perhaps expecting – that HTC might eventually lose its way. A bit like a novelist churning out novel after novel, it can’t be easy to keep the quality as high as it has been of late, with the release of top notch smartphones such as the TyTN II and the Touch Dual to name just a couple.

But continue to churn out quality products it does, and the Cruise – in the guise of the O2 XDA Orbit 2 on review here – is no different. At first glance this is nothing special. The face-on shots on the O2 website depict what looks like a bog-standard Windows Mobile PDA phone. There’s a large 2.8in screen above which sits a small lens for making video calls, below which is a familiar-looking cluster of control buttons. You can see the usual pick-up and hang-up buttons, plus a couple of shortcut keys for activating the start menu and OK commands and these flank what looks like a standard five-way navigation key.

But this is no ordinary Windows Mobile PDA phone and you only begin to appreciate how different it is until you meet it in the flesh. I’ll begin with the screen, which unlike the majority of touch screens I’ve seen in the past year, isn’t set back from the fascia surrounding it. In fact, the surface of the screen is one with rest of the phone’s front: its glossy surface extends right to the edges and down to the button cluster. It’s not glass hard like the HTC Touch’s screen or that of the iPhone, though, and has a slightly more plastic feel.

The effect is that the Orbit is a great-looking and feeling phone – and this is helped by the fact that the rest of the phone is equally well-designed. The button cluster is finished in a very nice matt-silver plastic and has a slightly concave, sculpted shape. The edge is wrapped in shiny chrome and the rest of the Orbit’s chassis is made from light but sturdy-feeling plastic finished with a tactile, grippy rubber coating. And it turns out that the five-way navigation cluster is out of the ordinary too. It’s a dual-purpose control: not only can you click in each direction to navigate up, down, left and right, the outer ring also rotates, allowing you to scroll through lists at a pinch.

There are a couple of negative points, however, about the Orbit’s design. First up it isn’t particularly slim for a phone without a sliding keyboard: it measures 110 x 58 x 15.5mm, which is about the same size as a TyTN II but not as thick, while it’s also 60g lighter at 130g. Second, I’d have liked to have seen a screen upgrade – this phone’s QVGA (240 x 320) is beginning to look a little like yesterday’s technology.

But if the screen isn’t incredibly high resolution, it does work brilliantly in conjunction with the Orbit 2’s host of interface enhancements. There’s HTC’s TouchFlo interface, of course – which adds much-needed finger-swipe scrolling and panning to Windows Mobile’s fiddly scroll bars – but you also get enhanced screen keyboards that offer not only mobile phone-like XT9 text entry, but also a BlackBerry Pearl-style, pseudo QWERTY keyboard with two letters per virtual on-screen ‘key’.

I particularly liked the finger-friendly enhancement to the top taskbar. With non-enhanced Windows Mobile you have to make sure you get your finger in exactly the right place, or the wrong option bubble will pop up. Here a larger bubble appears when you tap the taskbar, allowing you to choose between options such as notifications, Comm Manager and the volume control, but with larger icons.

The phone comes with other useful software extras. In addition to the usual Windows Mobile 6 Professional selection, there’s Audio Manager – a big improvement on Media Player; Camera Album – a handy picture viewer; Zip – for unpacking and compressing archive files; and a really useful RSS reader – RSS Hub. There’s also a simple, but much-needed, profiles tool, which allows you to quickly switch the phone between various different settings quickly.

But let’s not ignore the hardware. As is customary with HTC phones, the Orbit is rammed to the gills, with quad band GSM, EDGE-enhanced GPRS, WLAN, 3G and HSDPA up to 3.6Mb/sec. It’s powered by the same 400MHz Qualcomm processor as the TyTN II, has plenty of RAM (128MB) and a generous 256MB helping of ROM for internal storage.

Battery life from the 1,350mAh battery is similar to the TyTN II – I managed two to three days normal use from the Orbit per charge, which is about par for the course on a Windows Mobile smartphone of this size. You get an FM tuner in this phone too and a three megapixel camera, though there’s no flash or assist light.

The main attraction, however, is the device’s GPS receiver, which in the version sent for review was complemented by ALK’s excellent CoPilot Live 7 Professional, preinstalled on a 2GB microSD card. As we’ve pointed out before, CoPilot Live 7 is an excellent navigation package: it has remarkably clean and clear maps, superb voice instructions and all the features you’d expect to see in full-blown sat-navs costing around the £200. Plus it has the ability to receive traffic information over the phone’s data connection and an up-to-date speed camera warning database. It’s also good to see not only the software included with the phone, but also a solid goose-neck windscreen mount and car charger attachment.

The downside is that you only get UK maps with the Orbit. But the fact that, on an inexpensive 18 month tariff of £25 the phone will cost you £199, means you’re getting a highly competent sat-nav for very little extra money and this is one of the reasons why the O2 XDA Orbit 2 is more than the competent-but-boring PDA smartphone it looks at first glance.

Verdict

A superb touchscreen with accompanying software enhancements, and the inclusion of the excellent CoPilot sat-nav software and kit, all elevate the O2 XDA Orbit 2 from potential also ran to viable choice. If you don’t need the keyboard of the TyTN II it’s a competent and reasonably priced alternative, even if it isn’t quite as compact as one might desire.

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Design
You can’t call a phone (or indeed, anything) a “Mini” without it being small, and indeed at 58 by 108 by 18.1 millimetres, the XDA II Mini is a small smart phone, although of course it’s still only moderately sized from the phone side of the equation. In visual terms it’s not a great departure from the XDA II itself; you’ve got a directional button at the bottom of the phone, surrounded by four selection buttons (including the two call buttons), and a 2.8-inch display with a total resolution of 240 by 320 pixels. At around 150 grams, it’s much lighter than the XDA II or XDA IIs, but you’d expect that from a smaller smart phone.

Features
The XDA II Mini runs Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition for Pocket PC Phone Edition — try saying that three times fast — on an Intel PXA 272 processor running at 416MHz. With 64MB of Flash ROM and an equal quantity of RAM, it’s heavy on the storage side for a phone, but if you’re looking for serious PDA usage, you may want to avail yourself of the SD/MMC card slot that sits atop the phone.

Running a variant of the Pocket PC OS means it’s preinstalled with the most common PDA applications from the Pocket PC side of the fence — Word, Excel, PowerPoint Viewer and so on — as well as some custom O2 applications. Like the other XDA units, the Mini sports an integrated digital camera, and in keeping with the best that we’re seeing in mobile phone cameras at the time of writing, it’s a 1.3 megapixel unit, which should put it just into the acceptable and printable category.

As a phone, the XDA II Mini is tri-band GSM and GPRS capable, and as it’s a smart phone with visual keyboard facilities, creating and sending SMS and MMS messages is a snap. It’s also Bluetooth capable, although that’s not the only way to synchronise it with a suitable PC; a USB cable is also provided.

Performance
The first thing we noticed about the XDA II Mini is a common fault with smart phones lacking an integrated keyboard; the screen smudges quickly and often; we’d suggest carrying a cleaning cloth around with you if you’re keen to show this phone off to your friends. Aside from that, the display is clear and bright, with the usual adjustments for maximising battery life by dipping screen brightness depending on your situation. As a phone we had few complaints about its performance, aside from one situation where it for some reason it incorrectly grabbed contact details for somebody phoning us — although to be fair to O2, it does note on the splash screen of our review unit that it’s a test unit, so some bugs are probably inevitable.

As a PDA, the XDA II Mini sits well in a competitive category, although there’s not too much that really catapults it ahead of the competition per se, and the fact that the rocker on the side of the unit doesn’t perform scrolling functions — it’s a volume control for the PDA and phone capabilities — threw us for a while.

The XDA II Mini’s camera is one of the better implementations of a mobile camera we’ve seen for a while; it’s undoubtedly helped by having a rather larger than normal LCD for you to frame shots with, and wisely, there’s a focus on fun shots — including a number of silly shot templates to frame with — rather than serious photography. Predictably, without a flash, you’ll end up with a number of rather dingy looking photos at night, but daytime shots perform well.

O2 claims a battery life of around 180 hours standby and 4-5 hours talk time with the XDA II Mini’s 1,200 mAh Lithium Ion battery, although in our testing we’d suggest it’s capable of less if you’re using the PDA functionality much — we averaged around 2-3 days before needing to recharge the battery with only moderate usage, and predictably much less if the integrated Bluetooth was switched on.

Review Video:

O2’s new Xda IIs will be available here in late October. Its standout feature is a slide-out 39-key QWERTY keyboard which is designed to make it easier to use the onboard email, contact management, calendar and text messaging software.

The new device retains many of the core features of the popular Xda II, a Pocket PC with a built-in mobile phone. But O2 claims that the upgraded product will deliver 25 percent longer battery life, offering 4 hours’ talktime and 168 hours on standby.

The Xda IIs will run the Second Edition of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition operating system. The new model adds Wi-Fi (802.11b) to its predecessor’s Bluetooth and infrared, bringing it right up to date as far as wireless connectivity is concerned. However, the built-in digital camera remains a 0.3-megapixel, VGA-resolution unit.

The integrated GSM/GPRS mobile phone gets an upgrade to quadband (850/900/1800/1900MHz) status, making the Xda IIs a true “world phone”. The device’s ROM is increased from 64MB to 96MB but the processor and memory remain the same as before–Intel’s 400MHz XScale PXA263 and 128MB of SDRAM, respectively.

Early in 2005, the Xda IIs will support Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Connect, allowing email to be pushed to the device from corporate servers or via Web-based services.

Yesterday O2 added a new phone to its business handsets portfolio called the O2 Xda Graphite (pictured). It’s an O2-branded product, made by Asus, that runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone edition.

According to the O2 Web site, this is O2’s first 3G smart phone and Crave is glad to see that it hasn’t stopped providing O2-branded handsets after it fell out with HTC. Crave is also pleased to see that the Graphite packs a decent feature set, too.

There’s a colour screen that measures a relatively large 56mm (diagonally), a VGA camera on the front for video calls and a 2-megapixel camera on the back for taking the odd snapshot.

On the inside there’s 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity for keeping connected at all times, and support for push email so you can get your emails on the go. There’s also an MP3 player that plays MP3 and WMA files, and a Microsoft Office document viewer.

You can store all your music, pictures and work on an expandable microSD card and send it to other people via Bluetooth, 3G or Wi-Fi. All of this is powered by an Intel PXA270 416MHz processor and there’s 128MB Flash and 64MB SDRAM on-board.