At A Glance:

In The Box
- HTC S740
- MicroUSB cable
- MicroUSB Headphones
- HTC charger
- Charger pin converter

The HTC S740 just hit the rafters in our offices, and got everyone・s panties in a bunch. The Touch Diamond upgrade has a couple of new features and physical upgrades as well. The phone・s design and purpose is reminiscent of the E90, and reinforces it as a business device.

Design
The S740 is a redesign of the Touch Diamond into a thick candybar, inserted a keypad underneath that typically 2.5 inch screen and designed it into a smaller 2 inch screen. The thickness comes with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard of course.

However, you can trust HTC to deliver an attractive smartphone, the device is covered in the plate glass and the phone・s narrow profile is a good sight to behold, what the phone lacked in width it added up in girth, the bottom of the phone is considerably thicker and dense. The S740 has also gone into the heavy-weights smartphone category at 140g. The rear of the phone is covered in some sturdy soft plastics.

The 2.5 inch screen is a 65k screen with decent colours, sunlight legibility is also decent, it・ll work and more importantly the device has auto-detect to adjust lighting when you are outside.

The phone・s design means we split the de!ion into two parts, mainly the upper part which consists of the screen and a keypad. The bottom part is the slide out keyboard. The left spine of the phone has the volume rocker, meanwhile the right has the quick camera button. The power button lies on top, and the universal micro-USB port is placed at the bottom. The entire button placement is on the upper part of the phone.

The keypad is good, functional if you have used any Nokia keypad, and you・ll feel at home with this one. The rest of the keypad is pretty self explanatory, but the D-pad we would have preferred if HTC retained the dial-zooming in and out of pages would be so much more fun.

The QWERTY keyboard is intuitive - the buttons are wide enough for our thumbs to type comfortably.

One qualm with the placement of was the volume rocker which by all accounts is inconvenient, when the keyboard is slid close, triggering the volume rocker will gently nudge the entire top part of the phone, and we had to secure both sides of the phone to push the rocker properly.

The phone has 256MB RAM, 256 ROM and is powered by a Qualcomm 528 processor, and the WinMo OS runs pretty smoothly.

The SIM slot reminds us of the HTC TyTN II where the place the slider base of the phone, the microSD card slot is placed here too. The li- polymer 1050 mAh battery lies within the rear covers.

Windows Mobile 6.1 makes a non-touchscreen appearance here, and WinMo lovers can expect similar functionality and programs. However, for WinMo users who had been pampered by touch functionality, the lack of touchscreen here might be slightly debilitating. That being said, the main menu has a lot of icons to fit into a single screen and require several button clicks to ．flip・ through the entire menu. The other thing the unintuitive horizontal and vertical button placement, you・ll find yourself working at both keypad and the keyboard once you slide the QWERTY out.

The revamped version of the TouchFlo here feels less aesthetic and is much more straightforward and useful. It can access anything from your voicemails, connectivity options, ringtones to HTC・s weather channel. It・s easier and much more instinctive to use compared to WinMo・s menus.

Dormant programs remain in memory, so to speed things up expect to remove programmes through the task manager manually. The S740 is less sluggish and won・t force us to restart the phone periodically.

The device only comes installed with Internet Explorer, the S740 has flash installed with Internet Explorer, which means that we can enjoy Youtube on the go. No Youtube portal but Internet Explorer works anyways. Speaking of the Internet, HTC has dropped the automatic GRPS/3G switching when you have no Wi-Fi connectivity.

Office mobile makes a return here, Word, Excel, One Note and Powerpoint. The ．standard・ office mobile doesn・t allow creation of documents, only editing, which we find pretty strange, and limits the use of the QWERTY keyboard.

PIM
The S740 has several PIM options, from the calendar, organiser, calculator, tasks and quick notes.

Connectivity
The S740 sports quite a number of connectivity options, from EDGE, GPRS to 7.2 Mbps HSDPA. The smartphone also has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and a micro-USB port for data transfers. The phone also has quad-band GSM connectivity (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900).

Camera
The 3.2 megapixel picture quality is above average, and surprisingly well under low light conditions, despite not having flash. The shots do look like the colour bled out, as the pictures aren・t as bold or vibrant as they should be.

There are a bunch of options for from Quality, Resolution, Brightness, White Balance, etc. There are video, panorama, picture theme, contact picture, and MMS Video.

Verdict
The HTC S740 is all business, its whole purpose- call, text and work. The multimedia functions are there, but merely to add flavour to the device. Good connectivity also hammers home the phone functionality. However, the lack of Mobile Office functionality is a strange predicament for the phone.

At RM 1,999 it is quite a bargain for a smartphone- texting and typing in general are something we look forward to on this device. The phone is loaded with programmes, but without Office Mobile something feels lacking. While we recommend this device to power users, the phone shortcomings should be consider before making a purchase.

• Tags : HTC S740