HTC P4000

The HTC P4000 is a Windows Mobile device (though sadly only Windows Mobile 5, and not the most recent version 6). As usual, my reason for testing the device is NOT to look at its suitability as a mobile computing platform, but rather at the quality of the built-in cellular phone.


Ring volume is okay, but it could do with being much louder if you expect to hear it in a noisy environment. Under noisy conditions you will probably have to rely on the vibrator to alert you to incoming calls. Fortunately the vibrator is quite powerful, and so this might be enough to compensate for the ringer volume, so long as you carry the device in close enough proximity to your body to feel it.



I transferred a copy of the super-load ringtone I use in my i880 and it wasn’t too shabby, though it was still magnitudes quieter than the same ringtone coming out of my Motorola iDEN phone. I guess the lesson here is, to get the most out of a rather limited resource, it’s best to choose your ringtones wisely. As with most PDA-phones, the display looks great indoors, but it’s difficult to read in direct sunlight. When lighting isn’t an issue, the screen has excellent color clarity and it provides sharp images and very readable text.



The 2-megapixel camera is not bad, but hardly better than most other 2-megapixel camera-phones. On the plus side it has good lens linearity, surprisingly little digital noise in low lighting conditions, and a positively huge viewfinder. On the downside however, it has trouble keeping the colors true when there are varying light conditions in the shot, and it produces very odd ramping effects on sharp edges. Overall however, you’ll be reasonably pleased with the results once you get used to using it.



I’ve rarely been impressed with the quality of the phones that usually get grafted onto PDAs, and while I’m not exactly impressed now, the P4000 is at least a move in the right direction. If they could fix the three primary problems (soft earpiece, shallow tonal balance, and problems with background noise degrading outgoing audio) they’d actually have a fairly decent phone. Taken as a whole therefore, the P4000 is only average when it comes to the phone function, but that’s MUCH BETTER than most other PDA I’ve tested (especially from Telus).