E-Ten glofiish X500

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Features
The E-Ten glofiish X500 is a quad-band phone with GPRS support. Both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are built in--we'd have liked infrared too, but that is not offered.

There is 128MB of ROM built in, and our review unit had just over 50MB free for programs and data fresh out of its box. You can add to this with microSD cards. The uncovered but easily accessible microSD slot is, as we noted earlier, on the bottom edge of the casing.

There's a 2-megapixel camera with its own minute LED flash and a small self-portrait mirror. When you press the camera side button the screen becomes a viewfinder and around the edges of the screen, framing your shot as you line it up, is a series of large icons you can tap to alter settings. Making quick alterations to things like image size, color effects and use of the self-timer is therefore very easy.

E-Ten generally peppers its Pocket PCs with add-on software and the list provided with the glofiish X500 is long. Among the extras we are pleased to see an FM radio, which is still something of a rarity in Pocket PCs.

E-Ten, however, has made one of its few mistakes by not catering for 3.5mm headsets. The provided headset has a 2.5mm jack and you have to use this as the radio antenna. We�d have liked a two-piece headset allowing you to use your own 3.5mm headphones.

Among the library of extra software is a replacement for the Windows Mobile Today screen that uses tabbed sections to provide access to programs and settings via big, tappable icons. Or, if you prefer, you can add tappable icons to the Today Screen itself using another of the bundled applications.

There are a couple of useful extras on the phone, including Call Filter, which lets you set up 'allow lists' and 'blacklists'--handy when you only want to take calls from your nearest and dearest.

As for the GPS antenna, you can get a fix on your location and then send that location information via an SMS using pre-defined texts. E-Ten should have got someone with a grasp of English to check out its pre-set SMS texts as there are plenty of errors in them, but you can edit them to suit your own needs.

There are a few utilities for messing with images and a backup utility among the other extras.

Performance
We had no problem making and receiving calls with the glofiish X500. We did find the touchscreen a little unresponsive at times, though, and not just when using speed dial or the tappable on-screen number pad.

The battery was very impressive, giving just over ten hours of continuous music from a full charge with the screen forced to stay on. This bodes well for those wanting to use the glofiish X500 for music and radio listening, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or GPS away from mains power.