O2 Xda Guide review

O2 now has a very strong range of its Xda-branded Windows Mobile handsets, in fact they're all produced by Taiwan's HTC, a company that produces very similar devices under its own HTC Touch brand.

The O2 Xda Guide is actually very close to HTC's Touch Cruise, but comes bundled with a few extra goodies from O2. With both handsets, A-GPS is to the fore, with hard buttons on the front dedicated to SatNav and HTC Footprints.

Footprints is geo-tagging with knobs on – specifically, clicking on HTC's new footprint logo opens the 3.2-megapixel camera, allowing you take a photo (or video) of wherever you are, so you can make a record of the location, encouraging you also to write an accompanying caption or make an audio note, as well as add a relevant phone number.

It's nothing new really, but just as the iPod didn't invent portable music, it appealed because it wrapped a load of features up in an attractive and easy to use package.

The SatNav aspect comes courtesy of CoPilot Live 7, which is preloaded and ready to go on a supplied 1GB microSD card (you can boost the 512MB of onboard memory with memory cards of up to 32GB).

CoPilot Live 7 offers large, easy-to-use buttons as well as a variety of map views (2D or 3D, day or night) plus points of interest and traffic info. It's a neat package and works perfectly well in practice, but it is let down a little by the Xda Guide's smallish screen (smallish by SatNav standard that is) – at 2.8-inches, maps can look a little cramped and entering data via the onscreen keyboard is tricky at best, not that we'd ever think of doing such a thing while the car's moving.

Also included in the package are an easy-fit car kit and charger. The cradle sticks to the windscreen via a suction lever, which seems reasonably robust, while the charger plugs into your car's cigarette lighter in the usual way. It's not better than a professionally fitted system, but it's a reasonable compromise.

Elsewhere, there are other good things to admire about the O2 Xda Guide. It's slim and lightweight at 101x53x14mm and 103g and that large round D-pad beneath the 65,000-colour, 240x320-pixel touchscreen has a revolving outer circle which helps when scrolling through menus, or zooming in and out of pictures or web pages.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1, but it's firmly in the background, with HTC's attractive and intuitive TouchFLO interface to the fore, with thumb-friendly icons and some fun graphics.

The 3.2-megapixel camera doesn't have much in the way of frills, with no flash or fancy photography options, but it is quick to open (about two seconds) and takes reasonably sharp pictures, even if the colours tend to look a little more washed out than is strictly necessary – a decent little snapper in other words.

Viewing pictures is also fun thanks to HTC's gallery function, which allows you to brush your finger across the screen to change the pic, and you can zoom in or out of a particular part of a picture by tracing a circle on it with your finger.

The music player will show cover art if available and there's a customisable ten-band graphic equaliser to help you set the sound to your liking. As usual, the supplied headphones aren't much cop, but fortunately there's an adaptor for the USB slot which allows you to upgrade to the headphones of your choice via 3.5mm jack plug. Or you could use wireless headphones via the stereo Bluetooth connection.

The O2 Xda Guide is a quad-band handset with HSDPA 3G for fast internet connection on the move, plus Wi-Fi so you can access broadband where available. The web browser is easy and intuitive to use – a double tap on the screen will zoom in on the point you've tapped and you can set up RSS feeds from your favourite sites.

Office Mobile is on board too, so you can create Word and Excel documents, and you can view PowerPoint documents and PDFs. You can also Zip files for easy sending and, this being Windows Mobiles, there are loads of additional apps available for download.

The O2 Xda Guide is a neat and robust little touchscreen smartphone that covers all the work and play basics while excelling in one particular area. If you need a smartphone, and SatNav is important to you, but you don't want to go to the expense of a dedicated system, the O2 Xda Guide offers the next best thing.