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.

Features
As with the new Windows Mobile 5.0 devices, the 838 sports several enhancements including a revamp of the onboard Office applications. For example, instead of Pocket Word and Excel, you now have Word Mobile and Excel Mobile, with added support for embedded images, tables and charts.

We like that the LCD screen automatically switches orientation from portrait to landscape when the keyboard slides out, and does the opposite when the keyboard is closed. However, we can't help but notice that it takes a while for the screen adjustments to be made. In certain cases, the handheld operations also lag considerably. Interestingly, the display tends to be less sensitive in the landscape mode, making stylus input challenging when the keyboard is slid out.

With Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, the 838 enables users to watch encoded videos though we experienced sluggish video playback on more than one occasion. Music playback, on the other hand, is of satisfactory quality, as expected of most Pocket PC phones today.

The speaker function can be activated by holding onto the Talk button. While it is barely usable, especially in noisy environments, it is no doubt an improvement over the Xda II mini. The onboard 1.3-megapixel camera produces decent pictures and a flashlight is provided for taking photographs in low-light conditions.

Most users should find the 128MB onboard ROM sufficient. For those who want more storage capacity, a miniSD card slot is available for memory expansion. Do note that the 838 comes with persistent storage. That means that all your data will be retained even when the battery runs out.

Performance
On normal usage, the Dopod 838 can last for one to two days before its 1,250mAh Lithium-ion cell drains completely. The battery itself is removable, and more can be separately purchased for longer periods of mobililty.

Dopod employed a 195MHz Texas Instrument OMAP 850 processor for its 838 PDA-phone which, in comparison, seems a lot slower than the Xda II mini's 416MHz processor. As Windows Mobile does not support the closing of applications, all the programs opened continue to run in the background when a new application is activated. For this reason, the 838 simply fails to handle multitasking, which results in a considerable lag particularly when running processor-intensive applications such as the Microsoft Reader. In some cases, each letter takes a second or more to appear when typing SMS messages. During tests, soft resets have to be performed periodically to get the handheld back in proper operational speed.