HTC Shift review

Every six months or so, a new manufacturer takes it upon itself to flog the terminally-wounded horse that is the ultra-mobile PC. Samsung has cracked the whip three or four times, Asus had a go, and we've seen countless others try and ultimately fail in the process.

The latest to try its luck is HTC, a company best known for its mobile phone handsets. Its device, the HTC Shift, looks good on paper. It's small, packs a touchscreen, has a slide-out keyboard, and can be contorted into a laptop orientation. But can this £900 device be taken seriously, or is it just an expensive and ultimately flawed experiment?

Design
The Shift looks like the vast majority of UMPCs -- it's rectangular, has a 7-inch screen occupying the vast majority of the front, and has a range of shortcut buttons on the screen bezel. Mouse input comes courtesy of a half-inch square trackpad on the right side of the screen and two selector buttons on the opposite side.

The mouse thumbpad is fiddly, so it's probably best for you to use the touchscreen

The accuracy of this system is often poor and you'll need several thumb strokes to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, which is as frustrating as trying to wipe a red wine stain off your own shirt. Still, this setup seems slightly more responsive than it was on the Packard Bell EasyNote XS.

Just above the trackpad, there's a button that takes you into the 'communications manager'. Here, you can toggle the modem, wireless LAN, Bluetooth and push email settings, as well as brightness and volume levels. A button just below this lets you quickly toggle the screen resolution between the default 800x480-pixel orientation to an interpolated 1,024x600 pixels.

The face of the Shift is also home to a fingerprint reader and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. Arguably, the most interesting button of all is one that lets you switch between Windows Vista Business edition and an alternative Windows Mobile-based graphical user interface -- more on this later.

The Shift's trump card is its keyboard, which reveals itself when you slide the screen upwards. We've seen this sort of thing on UMPCs like the OQO model 2, but unlike the model 2, the screen can be folded vertically upwards so it sits at a near right angle to the keyboard. The Shift looks like a mini-laptop when in this mode, but sadly, the keys are so tiny you'll need the precision of a sniper to avoid making any typos.