The HTC TyTN is back, and this time it's ready to take you home using its built-in GPS sat-nav. HTC has upgraded the beloved HTC TyTN and produced the TyTN II, a handset that packs as much punch as Alan Sugar and will satisfy most of your business needs. It's available for £485 from eXpansys, but we expect it will be rebranded on most major networks and be free on a monthly contract soon.
Design
The HTC TyTN II looks and feels much like its popular predecessor, but TyTN users will notice the slightly different key layout and heavier feel when they first pick the TyTN II up.
On closer inspection though, the TyTN II is different to the original TyTN in several ways, most notably the large colour touchscreen. This tilts up, allowing you to see the screen at an angle and rest it on a table like a mini-laptop.
One of the TyTN II's star features is its tilting screen, which lets you view the display properly when you rest the handset on a table
We found being able to tilt the screen up and put it on a desk great for quickly checking emails or making video calls or viewing video clips.
Another notable design change from the original TyTN is the easy-to-access SIM card slot that's situated behind the front of the screen. This is very useful if you're planning on using it as a work and personal phone but have two separate SIM cards.
The slide-out keypad is great for typing and one of the best Qwerty keypads we have used so far. Handy additions that aren't featured on the original TyTN are two tiny LEDs that light up when you activate the caps lock or function key.
A small but very useful feature that remains from the original TyTN is a three-way scroll wheel on the top left of the handset that lets you scroll through emails very quickly and easily. This is an innovation we would like to see on all smart phones.
On the back you'll find a 3-megapixel camera, which is a nice feature but we're disappointed that, unlike the original TyTN, there's no LED photo light or better yet, a xenon flash.
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Usang Wiliams 20 January 2011
Good: the product is nice especially for some of us who cannot get our fingers off the keyboard.
Bad: the flex is quite delicate and deficult to get a spare one..
Comment: when it comes to connecting to the world,this product is quite efficient.. except in cases of my type;my flex is bad and i cannot get a replacement to it because i can't find it around...and another thing it aches my heart that such product with a 3 megapixel camera does not come with a flash for night viewing. well, all the i still love the phone!
buzzbee 11 March 2010
Good: Although it gets criticised, Windows is easy to use and office mobile is handy
Bad: Poor build quality, sluggish and touch screen isn't very responsive
Comment: The first thing to mention is the build quality. Many contracts now are for 18 or 24 months, so it is important that phones will last this long. The build quality on this phone was not as good as its predecessor, the TyTN that I had before it. Some of the hard keys are just transparent plastic, with a kind of transfer over the top, which rubs off over a period of time. The other hard keys are on a piece of aluminium, which came lose a few months after I bought it. The casing is quite flimsy all round. Also, the pull-out keyboard isn’t as tactile as its predecessor, so having always used it on the TyTN, I never use it on the TyTN II, preferring to us the on screen keyboard.
If you want a camera phone, forget it. This takes very poor photos, especially if the lighting is not perfect.
The touch screen is not that great and sometimes, trying to type anything, using the on screen keyboard will have you waiting for characters to appear, or pressing really hard, to get them to work.
This isn’t an awful phone though, but there are far better out there and although some things were added to the TyTN to make this phone, I found I was happier with the older phone
olliric 17 June 2009
Good: Tom tom
Bad: Most things
Comment: After over one year of use I just wanted to write few lines about my impression of this PDA.
I travel a lot and I thought that a PDA could be helpful to keep in touch and do the IT chores while on the go. I was very wrong and I regret having bought the damn thing. The device tries to do many things but none of them well. In retrospective it sounded too good to be true.
At the beginning I did make a point of using it to its best potential but after a while I got so tired and annoyed with it that I have recently used it mostly like just any other phone.
I thought I would give myself some time to get accustomed to the complexity of the device before jumping to conclusions.
Over one year later and I still find it cumbersome and totally user unfriendly. The guys at HTC should go to Apple to get a crush course in making something user friendly and intuitive.
Here are just a few things. The list is way longer but I would have to go back and try most functions to recall all the flaws.
- It's super slow. I am no super fast teenage geek but I am always waiting for the stupid thing to react to any command I give. It is very annoying and it's like stepping back to the time of the 286 PCs. The speed is archaic. For example it takes 4.5 sec to switch from the vertical screen to the horizontal and back.
- The buttons controls are very difficult to feel with the touch and are very cumbersome to operate. Especially the side ones. I am sure that even blind people would have problems using them.
- Windows mobile is as bad as Microsoft gets. It's slow, counter intuitive, user unfriendly. Early Vista at the power of ten!
- Window media player is a joke. I have been using the PDA to listen to music in the car and it's a miracle I have not crashed while trying to select some music yet. To get to the card MP3 files it takes a very contorted and long way.
- The touch screen is also very bad and difficult to use. A lot of the commands are way too small for a man's finger while using one hand. It is very difficult to select something on first attempt with your thumb.
- To open a running program is difficult. One has to press the top right menu and than select what is running by touch only. The bar is about 4 mm high and it's very difficult to select using one hand. One cannot select by using the scroll bar and button.
- During phone calls the screen goes out quickly and to get it back one has to look for the hidden button on the side, very, very bad.
- Voice recognition sucks. Since the controls are so bad I now use the voice recognition most times. It's rare that the damn machine get it right on first attempt. Repeating the name twice helps but not always. I end up having to raise the tone as if I was yelling. It is very embarrassing in public.
- The GPS takes a long time to get the satellites even when the data has been updated.
- Active sync is a disaster. The guy who design it should be shot. I have given up on it altogether. I had to buy small software to access the data in the PDA and memory card.
Active sync could just not do the most elementary operation in a simple and straightforward way. You simply cannot plug into a computer and access the PDA like a USB stick. You have to buy a program for that. Isn’t that a joke?
- The booting upon starting is the longest I have ever seen. Switching it off is also a chore. I just live it always on.
- The battery capacity is way too small. Some applications will run down the battery in no time.
The list goes on but I am getting annoyed just to think about it all. This is the first and last product I’ll ever buy from HTC. Unless you are a geek that gets pleasure messing with IT devices do not buy it. Its use will take an unhealthy amount of your time. It will not help your life, it will waste a lot of your time and annoy you in the process.
In the first few months I tried to fix it and make it work to an acceptable level by downloading ROMs that improved the performance and instal
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