Dopod 818 Pro, A Laptop in Your Pocket

Before I owned this phone, I was using an O2 xda mini, which also goes by the name, I-mate Jam, MDA compact, Qtek S100, Dopod 818, etc. I loved that phone but I really wish it had Wi-Fi access. I was tempted to buy an SD Wifi card for it but good thing I didn't or it would have been useless by now.

When the Dopod 818 Pro became available, it instantly became on top of my wish list. I was always looking at it through the window of that electronic shop downtown. Everyday I would look at it and drool until I finally got the courage to buy it.

FEATURES:

First, the features: The Dopod 818 Pro weighs around 150g with a display resolution of 320x240 pixels. It is a quadband phone supporting GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800 and GSM 1900. It has Bluetooth, Wi-fi, Infrared and GPRS connections. You can play mp3, WMA, WAV, or Midi ringtones. It has a 2 megapixel camera with a CMOS sensor. It operates on Windows Mobile 5, a TI OMAP 850 processor with a processor speed of 195mhz, 64mb of RAM, 128mb or ROM, you can expand it's memory with an SD or MMC. This phone comes with pre-installed applications such as Internet Explorer, Pocket MSN, Windows Media Player, Outlook Mobile, Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, ClearVue PDF and a wireless manager.

THE GOOD STUFF:

Okay, first, the camera. Yes, it still couldn't compare to Nokia's line of camera phones but compared with other PDA phone that has 2 megapixel camera, the Dopod 818 Pro's camera is by far, the best camera on a PDA phone made by HTC. It even has an adjustable lens for Macro pictures. The pre-installed applications are not bad and is what you'd expect from Phones running Microsoft's software. My favorite is the Windows Media Player. I could actually convert my movies and see it on the go. It really helps kill time when waiting for the train or bus. The Word and Excel Mobile are great for professionals on the go who hate lugging around their laptops. The downside is the QWERTY keyboard on screen is a little too small and you have to squint and make sure that you're accurate at pointing to avoid typing in wrong letters.

If you're going to buy this phone, I suggest splurging a little on a 1gb expandable memory to take advantage of the full functionality of this phone. With regards to it's built-in speaker, I still prefer the xda mini's speaker. When playing mp3s, just make sure you don't turn the volume to it's full extent or you'd risk getting garbled sounds.

But what I really like about this phone are the hundreds of applications that could be installed on it. There are thousands of apps and games on the internet that could make passing your time much more enjoyable with this phone. My favorite one is the TCMP player which plays xvid and divx avi encoded files. You can't imagine how other people are drooling every time they see me watching a movie on this phone. The games are not that bad either. Games for the pocket pc have high quality video and graphics, unlike games on the Java platform.

I don't know much about Wi-fi so I can't say I'm an expert on the Wi-fi capabilities of the Dopod 818Pro but I have surfed on Wi-fi hotspots of numerous coffee shops to say that, the Wi-fi on this phone works like a charm.

THE BAD:

But like all good things, there must be something bad about this phone, and there are some. First, like I said, the camera still cannot compare with Nokia's camera phones, but hey, if you really want a camera, then go buy yourself a digital camera and not a phone.

The limited memory also leaves something to be desired. With the Xda Mini, you can allocate your memory between the phone or programs with just the slide of the slider on your screen, now you just have to make do with a 64mb of RAM.

The processor on this phone also cannot compare with the Pentium processor on the XDA mini which is a lot faster but this could be fixed with a tweak which is available on forums for this phone.

CONCLUSION:

All in all, if you have the budget, you should really go with the Dopod 818Pro. It's like having a laptop in your pocket. Just buy an optional keyboard for this phone and you're all set.