Product: Group Sense Xplore G18 smartphone Price: Less than $3,600 Pros: Great form factor and usability Cons: Short battery life
We managed to get our hands on a working sample of Group Sense's G18 Xplore, its first mobile phone running the Palm operating system and probably the most exciting product from a Hong Kong company in a long time.
The G18 looks like any ordinary mobile phone, but the moment you switch it on and see it running the Palm system, it starts to impress. It is the lightest smartphone running the system, lighter than the Treo 600 from Handspring.
It sports a good quality 2.2-inch colour touch screen with a resolution of 160x240 pixels. At its heart is a 33-megahertz Motorola Dragonball chip, 16 megabytes of Ram without an expansion slot and the Palm OS, version 4.1. The most up-to-date version of the Palm OS is version 5.2.1.
True, in terms of specifications, it cannot compete with the more powerful Treo 600. A faster chip, an expansion slot and running the latest version of the Palm OS would be really nice, but then again, Group Sense was aiming to make the G18 smartphone appeal to the mainstream. So it had to keep costs down.
The G18, priced at less than HK$3,600, more than any other Palm-based mobile phones that came before it, has a real shot at becoming a mainstream product.
At 90 grams, the dual-mode general packet radio service phone is light. It is lighter than any smartphone on the market and is easy to operate. It is designed for one-handed usage as well as with the included stylus.