Wednesday, January 10, 2007
From Mt Olympus Comes the HTC TyTN
Posted by Phillip Dyson in "HARDWARE" @ 09:00 AM
Up Close - The Hardware
Figure 5: The Front.
Along the top:
Along the bottom:
Unfortunately only the Talk and End buttons light up in the dark. There have been many times when I thought that I was pressing the soft key buttons in the dark only to end up hittng the OK button instead. This, of course, causing the application to disappear from view.
Figure 6: The Back.
On the back we have the following:
Figure 7: Toshiba e830, Ipaq 2215, TyTN, ETEN m500, 3125.
Figure 8: 3125, ETEN m500, TyTN, Ipaq 2215, Toshiba e830.
The TyTN turns out to have almost an identical feel as the ETEN m500, which is not so bad when you consider that the TyTN packs in a sliding QWERT keyboard. When pulling the TyTN out of its box I was afraid that it was going to end up being too thick, but after using this phone for some time it turned out to be just the right size for my large hands.
Figure 9: Top View.
The top is completely smooth and featureless.
Figure 10: Left Side.
From Left to Right:
Figure 11: Right Side.
From Right to Left:
Figure 12: Bottom View.
From Left to Right, Top to Bottom:
Figure 13: The Keyboard.
The first thing that jumped out at me when I opened the keyboard was how fast it switched to landscape mode. There was almost no delay before I could start to use it.
The full QWERTY keyboard was comfortable to use when typing quick emails or text messages. Even short paragraphs were fine. I have to admit that there were times when a dedicated thumb board would have been nice for even "quicker" text messages, but when I think about losing the larger rectangular screen, I come back to my senses.
I would have preferred a dedicated number row rather than having to select the blue function key (left-most button on the bottom row) for each number or punctuation symbol. It gets tedious when having to type several numbers in succession. Like a phone number. And finally the keys click just entirely too loud for my taste.
