We were lucky enough to be among the first few people to lay hands on the brand new UMPC ‘Shift’ handset manufactured by the HTC company – the model that inspired a lot of rumor long before being officially announced. The novelty produced a somewhat ambiguous impression, primarily due to its large dimensions (207 x 129 x 25 mm) and a weight worthy of a cold weapon rather than a phone (800 g) Save for the familiar Windows Mobile / Windows Mobile interface, the device design has very little in common with the widely accepted idea of what a smartphone should look like:

Switching between WM and Vista takes almost no time, the word ‘instantly’ would actually be the best characteristic. This is mostly owed to the powerful hardware platform comprising the Intel Stealey 800 Mhz and a Qualcomm MSM 7200 400 Mhz CPUs as well as the trademark SnapVUE technology providing for quick access to e-mail, calendar, messaging and call services.

The device carries some 1 Gb of DDR2 RAM for Vista and 64 Mb of RAM + 128 Mb of ROM for Windows Mobile, let alone the hard drive of an optional capacity of 40 or 60 Gb. SD and MMC memory cards can be used for data storage as well, a full SDIO support is present to complete the panorama.

The huge 7’’ screen looks really good, supporting a 800x480 resolution. It’s powered with a TFT matrix sporting excellent brightness and perfect view angles. It looks good enough even in direct sunlight (though still might do even a bit better)

The HTC Shift also sports a full-fledged QWERTY keyboard, easy and comfortable to operate. The buttons are large enough and give a solid feel, the keyboard elements are well segmented. It’s accessible both in cascade and horizontal device orientations. The slider mechanism isn’t perfect yet – it doesn’t go the full way after a single touch in an automatic manner like most sliders do, hope this will be fixed prior to the product’s market entry.

The device’s telecom functionality is nearly identical with that of HTC TyTN II, the same Qualcomm II hardware is used. Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi modules are quite expectedly in their places. Interface slots include USB 2.0, 3.5 mm and even an VGA one. A fingerprint scanner is implemented. Unfortunately, there’s no main camera to complement the secondary VGA camera module used for making video calls only.

The gadget is powered by a 2700 mAh battery – quite a fascinating power output even for such an awesome hardware platform. Look forward to the upcoming article devoted to a thorough testing of the novelty.