Windows Phone Thoughts: Travelling with Pharos: A Review of the Traveler 117

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Travelling with Pharos: A Review of the Traveler 117

Posted by Don Tolson in "Pocket PC Hardware" @ 09:00 AM

The Walk About (continued)

Figure 8: Here's a shot with the back panel removed. The big grey thing taking up most of the centre bottom is the battery. Just above that on the left you can see the SIM card in its slot, and left of that, under the silver tab on the left edge, is the microSD card slot. Just above the battery and to the right are the camera optics and the speaker. Above the speaker, on the right side, it looks like there might be a GPS antenna connection, but there's no specific mention of this in any of the documentation, and no way to access this with the back cover installed.

With the microSD slot cover held in place by the back cover, I think the intent was for users to install a fairly large SD card and then just leave it there. Also, the SD card slot cover is only attached to the unit via a small, thin piece of rubber, so the whole system is not really geared to frequent swapping of cards. The 117 is SDHC compatible and Pharos says it will accomodate up to a 4Gb card. I can confirm this, but I didn't have a larger capacity card to see if they would also be supported.

Figure 9: Looking closely at the red arrow, you can see the small thin rubber hinge which is used to hold on the cover for the microSD card slot. I'm not sure this is going to survive a lot of card swaps.

Figure 10: Here's a shot showing the size of the stylus compared to the 117 itself. It barely fits in my smallish hands and feels flimsy. The telescoping versions found in other phones would have been a better choice.

I was disappointed in the stylus provided with the unit. Measuring about 70mm, it's just too small to hold comfortably in the hand. I also found the screen sensitivity to be inconsistent using the stylus. Gestures or taps with my fingers were always accepted right away, but intermittently, even after frequent re-alignments of the screen, stylus taps still needed slower or second taps to activate buttons.

Size Comparison

The Traveler 117 is very similar in size and thickness to the HP910c Messenger unit I reviewed a month or so ago. In fact, the 117 is about 1mm shorter than the 910c, 6mm thinner, and exactly the same thickness. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep the Messenger, so I wasn't able to get a side-by-side photo of the two together. And it wouldn't really be fair to compare the sleek 117 to the HTC Kaiser/Tilt I currently use as my day-to-day workhorse. :-)

So, the Traveler 117 is definitely a very pocketable companion. The biggest advantage of the Traveller over the Messenger would be the huge increase in available screen landscape.


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