Dopod 838

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By Calvin Chia
Nov 28, 2005

Touted as one of the two flagship products from new handheld player Dopod, the 838 (a.k.a. HTC Wizard) is one of the first PDA-phones released with the new Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. Ostensibly planned as an improved version of the Xda II mini, the 838's key features include a QWERTY keyboard that slides out from beneath the screen, onboard Wi-Fi connectivity and miniSD expansion slot. A similar PDA-phone version, called the Xda Mini Pro, was announced two months ago by O2 but it looks like the Dopod will have the upper hand here with the earlier product availability.

Design
Appearance-wise, the 838 is aesthetically pleasing enough as PDA-phones go. It sports a solid, sturdy grey plastic casing and resembles the Sony Ericsson's P910i smart phone to a certain extent. Like some camera-phones in the market today, the back of the 838 is designed in such a way that it imitates a camera form factor, with the shutter button directly under your index finger when you hold it up horizontally.

Despite a clear effort by the Dopod makers to keep the 838 within the compact form factor of the Xda II mini, the 838 is still a tad larger than the mini. It is also visibly thicker, most possibly due to the addition of the keyboard component. Having said that, the Dopod is relatively handy compared with other similarly featured PDA-phones in the market today.

As with most mobile devices, the struggle for real estate space means that some sacrifices have to be made. For example, the manufacturer chose to implement a smaller 2.5mm audio jack, which is incompatible with most standard earphones. The availability of a miniSD slot instead of one that supports standard SD cards also means that all your existing SD memory cards are rendered useless. Not to mention the extendable stylus which can be a pain to use for some.

Fortunately, the slide-out keyboard and well-spaced keys ensure that you need not extract your stylus for most of the common functions. Its 2.8-inch QVGA (240 x 320-pixel) screen serves its purpose though offering nothing spectacular.

For the uninitiated, there are actually three variants of the HTC Wizard. To differentiate itself from the competition, Dopod has chosen the WIZA100 design which sports a keyboard with wider and larger keys as opposed to the HTC Wizards offered by other vendors such as Qtek and T-Mobile. Overall, the keyboard offers good tactile feel and caters well to those with large stubby fingers. To enable users to type in the dark, symbols are highlighted red while text characters are illuminated by a white backlight.

Other than the usual basic keys, the Dopod 838 also comes with useful soft keys, similar to those found in Nokia phones where they can be used for common phone operations such as reading SMSes without the need to extract the stylus. Unfortunately, the soft keys are too small and not very accessible.

For those who access wireless networks, there is a handy connection button on the top left that instantly allows users to control the status of the handheld's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Volume and ActiveSync operations. A voice dial button on the right activates the voice command application that comes bundled with the gadget.