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Author: cheewee

The glofiish X500 Pocket PC phone by E-TEN inspires to lead the way in the Windows Mobile market. That's right. E-TEN has created a new brand and going forward, their devices will go under the glofiish name. Thanks to Trends Mobile, PPCSG got our hands on an early review unit. So does the GPS-enabled X500 live up to our expectations? Read on to find out as we cut out the fluff and give you the lowdown.

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Design
Thin is in. Picking up the X500, the first thing that strikes you is its girth. At a mere 15.5mm, this is easily one of the slimmer Pocket PC phones available currently.

Dressed in a shade of titanium, it is adequately accented with black trimmings to compliment. The clean lines and unstated design give the X500 a sophisticated look. Although the shell is mostly made up of plastic, E-TEN compensates with top-notch finish.

While its design scores in the visual department, the X500 lost points on usability. For instance, the directional pad is seated too close to the edge for comfort. The limited surface area of the pad makes its operation cumbersome too.


Running Windows Mobile 5.0 with AKU 3.2, the 2 softkeys compliment the operating system allowing you to navigate the system. However, omitting the OK and Windows keys meant one-handed operation is not possible when performing every day tasks. We found ourselves tapping consistently on the 2.8-inch 65K-color QVGA screen which is counter-productive.

On the top facade, E-TEN planted 2 buttons in addition to the speaker. One activates Location SMS, a nifty app that powers up the onboard GPS receiver to message the longitude and latitude of your current position to others. Then, there is a Home key that kicks in the M-Desk app, a multi-tabbed launcher that lets you execute programs with ease. If you desire, you can map both keys to launch programs you use frequently.


The left profile features the volume control, a mappable voice dial button and the 2.5mm stereo handset jack. We would have preferred a 3.5mm variant like the one on the HTC Universal so we can do away with a converter when using our favorite earbuds. However, noting the thinness of the unit, this may not be feasible.


On the right houses the power button, reset hole and a key to activate the onboard 2-megapixel camera. The placement allows you to hold the X500 horizontally when taking pictures. Again, we felt the camera was seated too close to the edge for comfort.


The camera lens, photo-light and self-portrait mirror are planted at the unit's back. A speaker grille ensures sound comes through properly. During testing, the X500's volume was loud and clear. When muted, the X500's vibration mode kicked in to get our attention most of the time.


To keep the device compact, the X500 employs microSD expansion. Located at the bottom of the unit, the spring-loaded mechanism lets you hot-swap storage cards easily. However, using microSD meant storage capacity is limited to 2GB currently.


Seated beside the expansion slot is the synchronization port. Thankfully, E-TEN chose a standard mini USB port over a proprietary one. This brings about the convenience of sharing the same cable with other peripherals for charging and synchronization.

The stylus silo can be found on the bottom right. We found the extensible stylus a little too short and light to wield comfortably.

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Features
Out of the box, about 54MB of the 128MB ROM is made available to the user for storage. This is a little disappointing as previous models such as the E-TEN M600 offers a more spacious storage. RAM-wise, about 31MB is available for program execution after a soft reset.


Without doubt, connectivity is the main strength of the X500. This slim device packs in quadband GSM, GPRS/EDGE, fast 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR and even a GPS receiver courtesy of the popular SiRF Star III chipset. Music enthusiasts will be happy to hear that the X500 supports A2DP.

The bummer is the lack of UMTS or HSDPA support for high speed data connectivity. This means surfing speed on the X500 can be sluggish compared to other 3G-capable models.

On a brighter note, the X500 is one of the few Pocket PC phones with integrated FM radio. Needless to say, you need to plug in the headset to tune in. In our tests, the reception was reasonable good and the X500 had no difficulties picking up most stations. However, we experienced slight distortions for some such as FM95.0. While the radio app is quite intuitive and laden with large buttons, we would have preferred if it is better designed to make use of the softkeys in Windows Mobile 5.


Contrary to what other sites reported, the X500 2-megapixel camera has no auto-focus capability. If you want to capture close-ups, you're out of luck too as it lacks a macro function. Quality-wise, the 1600x1200-pixel pictures from the camera was just passable in our tests. Outdoors, photos generally turned out well-exposed but lacked color vividness and contrast.

To get decent shots indoors, bright lighting is a must. Without that, photos would come out blurry and noisy. Fortunately, the onboard photolight provides illumination for objects up to about a meter away. Interestingly, the X500 is capable of shooting 320x240-pixel videos in 3GP format.

Under its hood, the X500 packs in a GPS receiver for navigation purposes. In our tests, getting a GPS fix can range from mere seconds to almost 2 minutes depending on the condition and environment. On average, it took about 40 seconds to achieve a fix when we are on the move. Stationary, the X500 fared much better resolving the 3D position in about 20 seconds. Usually, the device snagged 8 to 11 channels.

Kudos to E-TEN for bundling a host of nifty applications for the X500. For example, there is a Scenarios app that lets you set different profiles to control sound and backlight on the device. The bummer is that you have to manually activate your preferred profile. There is also a Call Filter program that lets you block calls from certain numbers.


Not forgetting media enthusiasts, E-TEN has thrown in Image Maker to tweak photos and Image Wizard to step you through adding special effects to your pictures. There are also useful system tools such as a Backup Utility and Application Recovery that lets you pick and install apps stored in ROM.

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Performance
The E-TEN X500 is powered by a Samsung S3C2442 400MHz processor that is known for its speedy performance. It did not disappoint during the review period. The X500 whizzed past day-to-day tasks and we experienced few slowdowns. Still we had to put it through the paces with Spb Benchmark to get some real figures. The numbers showed that the X500 stacked up pretty well to the other Pocket PC phones on the market currently.


We also put the E-TEN to the battery test. With the X500 set to flight mode and its backlight turned to maximum, we cycled a video until its 1,530mAh cell is completely drained. The E-TEN lasted a commendable 8 hours and 48 minutes. As a comparison, the Mio A700 lasted 7 hours 29 minutes.

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Here are some sample pics from the X500's 2-megapixel camera. Due to bandwidth issue, we have resized the images to 1024x760 pixels. However, there are no further touch-ups.

[bnycastro]

nice review chewee! i wonder when eten will come out with qwerty devices...?

[wanwei]

price tag?

[lmf2501]

wanwei, on Nov 8 2006, 11:02 PM, said:

price tag?

a member spoke to trendsmobile, around sgd1100+, available end of the month

[wanwei]

very tempting to get it... but the price tag...

[vapor]

i am so tempted to get this but the high possibility of eten releasing a + version in the near future takes a bit of shine off it.