DOPOD U1000

Manufacturers have been experimenting with small form factor computers for decades now, with varying degrees of success – but even now, there just hasn't been one compelling enough to make large numbers of people choose a tiny computer over a regular notebook.

Now Dopod is taking a stab at it with the U1000, a device with a completely new form factor for a Windows Mobile device – it's the largest Pocket PC ever made, but very tiny when you compare it to notebooks.

What it is

The U1000 is one nice-looking device. I've seen many nice handhelds come and go, but the designers really went to town with the design of the U1000.

The brushed aluminium finish with white accents looks really elegant and brings to mind the design of certain Sony products.

Also included is a very nice leather wallet which does double duty – not only does it serve to protect the U1000, but it also houses the keyboard which is attached via a very strong magnet system.

Similarly, the main body of the U1000 attaches to the keyboard magnetically and once it all comes together, you have what looks much like a very funky little notebook PC.

The only thing you have to remember is that with these strong magnets being used, you should never keep the U1000 in a bag together with your credit cards, bank cards or portable hard disks as it might result in all the data stored on the magnetic media being wiped clean.


FUNKY DESIGN: Sitting on its magnetic keyboard, the Dopod U1000 looks just like a funky notebook PC.
Turn it on and you'll be presented with the classic Windows Mobile 5 interface (an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 is promised soon) – a Today screen with your calendar, messages, etc displayed on the front although displayed a LOT bigger than what it usually looks like on other devices.

In fact, I think the screen is a little TOO big for Windows Mobile – the soft keys, icons and toolbars look really large on the screen of the U1000, thus offering no real advantage in terms of desktop real-estate unless you have some form of myopia.

Nevertheless the device works well in Tablet mode, with some very strategically-placed buttons that can be used whether you set the device in landscape or portrait mode – there's a directional joystick for navigation, a Windows key and an OK/Close key, all three of which will allow you to navigate without having to tap the screen much (except for the software keys which are only mapped to buttons on the keyboard if you have it connected).

If you attach the device to the keyboard, it will automatically switch to landscape mode, which is generally the orientation that you will be using the U1000 in.

Let's not forget that the U1000 is also a phone and a 3.5G (HSDPA) one at that – the SIM card slot is located in the battery compartment although since the slot is very narrow, there's a special way to access the SIM slot.

To get access to the SIM slot, you first have to take out the battery (which even here has a special catch which is actually attached to the battery itself) then flip a little cover to open the SIM slot. All I can say is that it's lucky I don't have to do this every day!

Thankfully, the U1000 has its own network setup wizard, much like O2 devices, which means all the connections and MMS settings will be set for you automatically when you insert your SIM card – a lot easier when it comes to Windows Mobile devices, as the network settings are all over the place.


The Dopod U1000 is about the size of a paperback novel.
Since it's a really large device, you might be wondering how you're supposed to put this humongous device to your ear to make a phone call.

Well, luckily you don't have to – if you don't have a Bluetooth headset or the supplied headset handy, the U1000 by default works as a speakerphone, and it's loud enough that you can comfortably hold it in front of you to make a call, except in the noisiest of environments.

On the hardware side, the U1000 is as packed as they come – not only is it a 3.5G phone, but it also comes with a built-in SiRF StarIII GPS chipset, 3-megapixel digital camera with a VGA secondary camera for video calls, runs on the Intel (now Marvel) PXA270 624MHz XScale processor and, surprise, surprise, has an 8GB hard disk drive. Yes you read it right – an 8GB MicroDrive is used for storage inside this device in addition to the already generous 256MB of regular storage ROM and the 128MB of RAM for running applications.

Non-tactile keyboard

Of course the most interesting feature of the U1000 is also its Achilles heel – the detachable magnetic keyboard is really cool, but unfortunately, there's very little tactile feedback as the keys are really flat and have very little travel.

I'm pretty used to all kinds of funky keyboards, but I have to say that the U1000's keyboard is certainly NOT one of my favourites.

The only good thing I can say about this keyboard is that at least it's a good stand for the PDA when you want to watch movies.

Keyboard issues aside, the U1000 actually performed very well and was speedy in actual use.

However, when I tried to install Coreplayer, the payware version of the classic TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player) for my usual performance test, I discovered that there were some driver issues with the built-in ATI Imageon graphics chip that wouldn't allow me to properly run either Coreplayer nor TCPMP.


A little research revealed that this is a common problem with certain handhelds running the ATI chip and is apparently not a problem with Coreplayer per se.

Dopod has interestingly included the Opera browser with the U1000 even though it already comes with Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) – a good move, IMHO, since Opera is a more full-featured browser and has better support for high-resolution screens compared with PIE.

Unfortunately, the screen's VGA resolution doesn't really help the browsing experience much – considering that this screen is about 5in, the pixels are quite visible and webpages don't look much better on it than on my VGA Axim x51v Pocket PC.

I'd have preferred it if Dopod had upped the screen resolution as well to maybe about 800 x 600pixels to take advantage of the extra size of the screen – most webpages are built for at least 800 x 600pixels nowadays anyway.

Tilt and navigate

Another really nifty feature that the U1000 has is VueFLO, which takes advantage of the accelerometer (normally used to protect the hard disk from damage by parking the heads when the device is accidentally dropped) to give you scroll control in the browser.

With VueFLO activated, you can scroll down or up long webpages in Opera or PIE by just tilting the U1000 backwards or forwards – a small tilt forwards will scroll the page down slowly and if you tilt the device more, the scrolling speed will be faster.

This method does take some getting used to but it does work quite well in use, although you may occasionally find yourself scrolling down the page if you accidentally tilt the device when reading.

The large screen did work very well for the GPS feature – with MapKing R12 running on it, the screen was bright and clear enough to see even when driving.

However, be aware that the U1000 does not come with any car mounting kits in the standard bundle, so if you are going to be using the GPS on the U1000 a lot, you might have to spend extra getting the car kit.

Battery life was actually pretty good – with occasional use of WiFi, regular use of the phone, and playing a few videos, the battery lasted about two days, and from the looks of it, should last you about a day at least under heavy use.

The 3-megapixel digital camera worked very well – though not the sharpest compared to standalone cameras, it is better compared to those found on phones and other handhelds.

The 8GB hard disk drive inside is probably the most ever integrated into a Pocket PC device, and should give you loads of space for almost anything you want to store, including a compressed movie or two or lots of music.

The only problem is that you have to go through the Microsoft ActiveSync connection to transfer files to the hard disk. This means you need ActiveSync installed on the host PC and since not all PCs have this, you can't really use the U1000 as a portable hard disk like you can with some hard disk-based music players.

Also the transfer rate via of ActiveSync is very, very slow – it took me a good 45 minutes to transfer about 3GB of data – it would have been better if Dopod provided a sort of pass-through where you could access the hard disk drive directly, at USB 2.0 speeds.

Conclusion

So is the Dopod U1000 the perfect mobile computing device?

From a performance standpoint, the device is hard to fault – it is fast and most of the features work as advertised.

However for RM4,288, I really expected much more, such as a full-featured operating system like Windows XP or Vista instead of just Windows Mobile, for example.

Sure, Windows Mobile is pretty full-featured and battery life is good, but it doesn't have the flexibility nor the wide selection of software compared to its desktop siblings.

I mean just think about it – for the same price you can buy a very good Windows Vista notebook that can do a whole lot more AND perhaps throw in a Bluetooth GPS device or a mobile phone to go with it.

Yes, there is an argument for putting it all into a single device, but if so, each separate component has to work well enough to make it a compelling device.

While the Dopod does everything, none of them really stand out – for example, as a phone it makes some things (such as tapping out a simple SMS) very difficult to do; and as a wordprocessor, the keyboard makes it very difficult to type fast and accurately.

About the only thing that works very well is the GPS where the extended screen space allows for very easy viewing in the car – but that's still a bit too much to pay for just this feature.

Pros: Great design; feature-packed for a Pocket PC.

Cons: Too expensive.

Quoted from : The star online