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By John Chan
May 24, 2007

The O2 Xda Flame is completely black, so don't be fooled by its name. Bright red and orange won't go down well with the techie crowd anyway, so it's just as well. What really counts is what's inside, and this handheld certainly has a lot going there. It costs S$1,498 (US$1,101.47), and will be available from next week in Singapore. It will also be available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia, though release dates for those are still unconfirmed.

Design
Given its huge 3.6-inch display, the Flame is understandably larger than most other PDA-phones. Its dimensions are 125 x 73 x 17.5mm, very similar to the old Xda II handheld from about four years back. Even its weight is similar at 190g. Make no mistake, though. The Flame is a very different handheld internally.

The sides and front of this O2 have a soft touch finish, which gives it a rubbery feel. This is good for grip, and fingerprints don't show up as obviously compared to glossy finishes. The plastic back cover has a checkered design and feels a little flimsy compared to the solid construction of the rest of the device.

	The area around the Flame's screen has a soft-touch feel.

A small round direction pad below the display is surrounded by two softkeys, two shortcut keys and the Call and Hang up buttons. Aside from those, there is no lack of shortcut buttons on the sides. These include volume controls on the right side together with the camera shutter button, and two on the left which activate the memo and Wireless Manager applications. Also found on the right is a microSD slot for memory expansion.

Handhelds which are primarily stylus-controlled tend to favor the right-handers, which is wise considering most people aren't lefties. For that reason, the Flame's stylus slot is on the bottom-right corner. We expected a larger stylus, but what's in the slot is a stick-thin one, hardly what you'd expect given the size of this handheld.

The last PDA-phone we reviewed with a VGA display was the Dopod U1000. While it is tempting to compare the two, the differences in form factor of the two are apparent. The U1000 is quite a bit larger and is able to fit a 5-inch screen compared with the O2's 3.6-inch one. Also, at 375g, the U1000 is about twice the weight of the Flame. For those reasons, this O2 handheld is much more portable than the Dopod even though it doesn't have as many features--then again, very few handhelds can match the feature set of the U1000.

Features
The basic wireless features you'd expect on a high-end Windows Mobile PDA-phone are present on the Flame. These include 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and IrDA. Unfortunately, it doesn't support HSDPA, nor does it have a GPS chip.

Found on the bottom of this handheld is a standard mini-USB connector for charging and syncing. The Flame's connector has one more trick up its sleeve, which is support for USB On-The-Go (USB OTG). This allows you to plug in an adapter, which ends in a regular USB port, to which a flash drive can be connected. Files can then be copied to or from the USB drive. All USB mass storage devices are supported and the USB device appears as a hard drive in the File Explorer program. One possible use of this is to copy images off a camera into the Flame, using its 2GB flash memory to free up the camera's memory card even when there's no access to a computer.

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