HTC S640 Full review

16 May, 2008 Gadgets

I have had the Telus HTC S640 for over a week now so I thought it was time that I did up a full review of it. So here we go.

Let me start by saying that I got this phone because it was cheap (with customer loyalty and new term package it only cost me 50 bucks). The main selling feature over some of the other units was the WiFi capability, I really wanted to be able to use the phone off-line in hot-spots especially when I am in the USA so I don’t incur roaming data charges.

My main reason for upgrading at all was the mobile email capability which for me works amazingly well, using the IMAP protocol in Outlook 2007 and on the phone I can sync my Gmail account between the web, my desktop and my phone without issue.

The unit runs Windows Mobile 6 (Smartphone) and comes bundled with Office Mobile (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) and it really is great if you need to edit or approve a document while you are on the go. With Active-Sync the contacts from Outlook on my desktop show up in the phone and any changes I make in either the phone or on the desktop sync flawlessly. The phone call quality is very good and overall I am pleased with how it functions as a phone it does what you would expect. It also supports Bluetooth, and has a microSD expansion slot which will take up to a 4GB card (although I hear people are using 8GB without issue). It also has a 2MP AF camera. It ships with a stereo headset, charger and y-adaptor so you can use the headset and charge or sync at the same time.

As for the negatives about this phone, there are a few. The camera is just terrible, I have yet to take a decent picture of anything. It is very slow and without an enormous amount of light and and incredibly steady hand you get unusable pictures. I didn’t buy this as a replacement for my digital camera but I was hoping to be able to use it to snap picts to email to clients to show them things I have found or just to friends for fun, neither is really possible and I have almost given up using it. The WiFi and Bluetooth, while very useful, are brutal on your battery life, it won’t last the day if either is turned on all the time. Last but not least is sync time, it takes about 20mins to sync 2GB of songs to the microSD card which is really a problem if you decide to change over your music at the last minute.