By John Chan
24/05/2007
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,40031861p,00.htm

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, 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.

On the left side of the Flame is another connector for TV-out. This allows output of what's shown on the screen onto an external display like a TV or projector. A cable is provided for this purpose, which also has a 2.5mm audio jack on the same end as the TV-out jack. The other end of this cable splits into three RCA jacks for composite video and stereo audio. This worked seamlessly when we tried it on an LCD TV, and is best used with the Flame's screen in landscape mode as TVs and projectors are usually in that orientation.

	With support for USB OTG, you can copy files to and from flash drives using the File Explorer application.

Installed on the O2 are many applications that make the handheld more user-friendly. These include O2 Phone Plus, which makes it easy to find contacts when in the phone application, and O2 SMS Plus which lists both received and sent text messages in the same page for more convenient viewing. One particularly useful application is the O2 Menu. When running in the background, it can be brought up by pressing and holding the top right corner of the display. You will then be able to quickly perform tasks like connect to the Internet, reset the device, and most importantly, quickly close active programs to free up memory.

The VGA display on the Flame does not disappoint. It may not be as large as Dopod's 5-inch U1000, but does well to display Web pages in a browser. It also helps in Excel Mobile to view more cells than what is possible on a regular QVGA display. We did find that the screen was not terribly bright. While we don't need a handheld's screen to be retina-scorching, the maximum brightness of the Flame just isn't as bright as we would have liked--especially when there's a need to use it under the noonday sun.

Powering the display is the Nvidia GoForce 5500 graphics processor. This is supposed to improve the graphical prowess of the Flame, but at press time, O2 was not able to provide any applications that make specific use of it. Like the ATI GPU on the Dopod U1000, this Nvidia GPU is supposed to help when processing graphically-intensive applications like videos and games. While this is not something we can benchmark objectively at the moment, we can say that the videos and games we tried on the Flame ran smoothly.

	With the provided cable, users can output the display and audio from the Flame to a TV or projector.

Also built into this O2 is an FM radio. This has to be used with a stereo headset, a pair of which is included with the Flame. We found no major flaws in the radio and were able to find and listen to the popular radio stations without hiccups. The stereo headset provided has earbuds that go into the ears. O2 has even provided replaceable earbuds of different sizes, a detail we appreciated. While this 2.5mm audio headset won't replace your high-end in-ear earphones, it sure is a step up from the horrible earphones that usually come with PDAs.

Performance
An Intel 520MHz processor powers the Flame. In our daily use, we found it to be snappy in menus and applications. However, we did notice that it took us about 2 seconds for the Flame's display to turn on after pressing the power button. While not a deal-breaker, it certainly is annoying and will take some getting used to.

Voice connections were all right. We experienced clear audio quality and no dropped calls in our use. The video call quality wasn't that good, though--the other party found our video image fuzzy. While the front camera may not be great, the main 2-megapixel camera did very well to provide sharp images and, even in indoor conditions, image noise remained at a tolerable level.

Battery life is always a concern for products with high-resolution displays. We got only about a day's use on a single charge of the Flame's 1,620mAh battery. The rated cell life of this handheld is 4 hours of talktime when connected to the 3G network.

Our review unit came with Windows Mobile 5.0. O2 said it is testing Windows Mobile 6 on it, but at the time of writing this, there was still no confirmation as to whether there would be an upgrade. More information on that development to follow as it becomes available.