HTC TyTN II review: Kaiser of PocketPCs

Your office on the go

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and all of them are easily syncable with MS Outlook. The Calendar is improved in comparison to the one used in Windows Mobile 5, as now it allows searching for events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends form the Calendar if you use it for business purposes only.

The Calendar offers daily, weekly, monthly and yearly view

The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Voice recorder files also get saved to the notes folder.

The To-Do list • putting down a handwritten note • the Voice recorder looks like the Media player

The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. As a frequently used feature, Microsoft should have put more effort into making the alarm clock easily accessible. Instead, it's buried down in the Settings menu. Alongside you will also find the dual-zone clock. The Calculator is another well-known application (as ugly as it gets), which is among the few things in Windows Mobile intended for stylus-free usage.

The Alarm clock • the dual zone clock • the calculator

Among the other interesting applications that come with the HTC TyTN II are the Office Mobile, Adobe Reader LE, the ZIP manager, the Business card scanner, the Windows Live service and the Search application. The Office Mobile features support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office files. The Adobe Reader LE opens Adobe PDF files, while the ZIP manager adds support for archived files.

Opening an Excel document • reading a Word document • listing available ZIP archived files

All the applications can work in landscape mode, too. The screen rotation feature is nothing new though, as it has been available ever since Windows Mobile 5.0. As we mentioned earlier, sliding the QWERTY keyboard out automatically rotates the screen to landscape mode, however you can also rotate it through a dedicated system setting.

Editing an Excel and Word files • Adobe Reader LE allows multiple zoom levels

The WorldCard Mobile is a business card scanning application preinstalled for you by HTC. It uses the camera to capture the business card and then does its character-recognition trickery to eventually return all contact details on the card ready for saving. Well, this isn't the first business card scanning application we see, and it is not that reliable. Even the application we saw in the Samsung U600 outperforms it.

The HTC TyTN II is a wonderful device and it packs in some nice features. Its design is high-tech, yet solid and functional. The communication capabilities allow using it in almost every out-of-the-office scenario. We liked the QWERTY keyboard and the notebook-like usability of the device.

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The Search application is rather useful, as it searches throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in places you need.

A search for Dexter returns the contact entry plus an image named the same way • filtering your search

Windows Mobile 6 integrates Windows Live, which replaces the MSN search and messenger, which we know from previous versions. You can also download the application Live Search for free, that works great with or without the integrated GPS receiver. With it you can find information on local businesses, restaurants, places of interest and even gas prices (the service is currently available only to US and UK). It has nice support for speaker-independent voice recognition that you can use to do your searches.

A Windows Mobile device is a rather versatile gaming platform thanks to the widely-available third-party developed games. Beside Java you also get the games developed natively for Windows Mobile. However, manufacturers usually go the more conservative route and ship their devices with only the default Windows Mobile games: Bubble Breaker and Solitaire, none of which is that amusing.

Bubble Breaker • Solitaire

Final words

The HTC TyTN II is a wonderful device and it packs in some nice features. Its design is high-tech, yet solid and functional. The communication capabilities allow using it in almost every out-of-the-office scenario. We liked the QWERTY keyboard and the notebook-like usability of the device. The integrated GPS receiver is another really cool feature. The battery too is on par with the rich feature set of the device.

The downsides we found with the TyTN II are that it doesn't have a VGA resolution display and it's not really pocketable. It doesn't have a 3D accelerator or USB host function either . The 400MHz Qualcomm processor is somewhat sluggish and is incapable of playing video at a resolution higher than QVGA.

So although the HTC TyTN II will be a highly sought after gadget, we don't find it to be the ultimate communication device. The particular mix of features will probably account for its high popularity but it fails to justify an upgrade from the original TyTN though, as the innovations it offers just don't seem to balance with the swollen price. However the HTC TyTN II is a great option if you are upgrading from an older device, or if it's your first step in the PocketPC world.