This phone has everything which your laptop has been giving you. And you get a bonus with this and that’s the calling facility. Certainly calling it a phone seems quite unusual.

This phone is something more than just a phone.

 

This QuadBand GSM phone has an 800×480 pixel wide VGA 7 inches display. The TFT touch screen with 16 M colors display looks simply awesome. The color, contrast and everything reminded us our PCs. The overall dimension of this phone is 190×135×30 mm, which makes it a little bulky to carry. It has a QWERTY keyboard and the handwriting recognition software, which makes it seamless to use. You get miniSD with 1 GB RAM, 30 GB hard disk drive and 1.2 GHz via CPU.

Shift has a 3 mega pixel video call camera, Phones like Shift are focused on corporate clan so they hardly need a camera. This phone/laptop is surely a major step towards portable computing and communications.

A 3 megapixel camera will help with video conferencing, while the whole system when folded can act as one of those “snazzy” tablet PC things or just an incredibly large touchscreen PDA.

In our brief play the touchscreen wasn’t the most intuitive thing to use and it would have been nice to have included an IBM style “nipple” on the keyboard to make navigating around the desktop with the mouse a little easier. There are click buttons on the side, but it’s just not the same.

The move to Vista means that you’ll be able to do anything you could do on a laptop (it will be interesting seeing what it’s like playing games on it) albeit with a smaller screen and HTC promise the usual 3 to 4 hours when in Vista mode.

Software

As for apps on the HTC Shift, its running Microsoft’s latest, Windows Vista Business, and Windows Media Player 11, for the latests in music and video support.

HTC could be a huge competitor for the UMPC crowd. They are already dominating the Windows smartphone business

The HTC Shift is like your standard laptop, just a little smaller. For those that have got to be connected but need more than just a smartphone, this will be very appealing.

The only catch we can see so far on our first look is the lack of USB ports (there is one) and of course no CD drive in the box, meaning if you want to install any further software you’ll have to invest more cash with someone else.

HTC Shift specification:

· Windows Vista Business (3 hrs battery)

· Intel Santa Rosa A110 Processor

· 1GB DDR2 RAM

· 40GB HDD

· HSDPA (Data only) ready

· Web Cam

· Biometrics security

· Windows Pocket PC (over 5 days battery life when used exclusively)

· Qualcomm 400MHz Processor

· 64MB RAM