HTC Shift review

Features
The HTC Shift uses two separate operating systems. Users can choose between Windows Vista Business edition or the 'SnapVue' PDA-style graphical user interface. The latter is occasionally useful since it boots in seconds and gives you quick access to your calendar, Outlook email, SMS text messages, local weather and your contacts list.

The keys are so small, they'll drive you insane

The downside is that it's not possible to add any new applications, so its functions are fairly limited -- most users will end up running Windows Vista Business edition as that's the only way to do anything useful.

That's where the Shift falls down. Vista Business edition demands a PC with at least a 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM, but the HTC Shift's CPU runs at a maximum frequency of 800MHz, or 600MHz when it's trying to preserve battery life. It's not as if the rest of the chip's architecture helps matters -- the 400MHz front side bus is nowhere near as high as the 1,066MHz FSBs on the latest 'Penryn' Core 2 Duo laptop CPUs, and it has a paltry 512kb of level 2 cache memory.

Those scraped processing knees are enough to put most people off buying the Shift, but if not, consider this rugburn: its A110 CPU will soon be superseded by the forthcoming Intel Atom CPUs, which already look like a more promising mobile solution.

HTC has opted to use a traditional 40GB hard drive at the expense of solid-state memory. This keeps the total cost per gigabyte to a respectable minimum, and although the total capacity isn't anything to scribble down for mum, it's enough to store office files, a couple of dozen DivX movies and a few hundreds MP3s. Video and audio can be piped to external devices courtesy of the D-Sub video port at the rear of the device, and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the left.

Those who intend to use the Shift as a video playback device won't be too disappointed. The 7-inch screen is clear, bright and -- best of all -- isn't coated in a glossy finish, so it remains visible even in direct sunlight. We also appreciate that it's touch-sensitive and can react either to finger inputs or to the inputs of the bundled stylus. The latter, it has to be said, is ideal for typing directly on the screen. Happily, Windows Vista's handwriting recognition worked nearly flawlessly, making this method of input our favourite.