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Pocket PC Phone Reviews E-TEN M500 GSM Pocket PC Phone (now sold as the TORQ P100 in the US)Check out the newer E-TEN M600, released Dec. 2005 Reviewed July 7, 2005 by Lisa Gade, Editor in Chief You've come a long way, E-TEN! We reviewed their P300B Pocket PC phone a year ago, and weren't impressed. E-TEN wants to be a major player in the PPC phone space and they've reinvented their product line with the M500. Like the i-mate JAM, the E-ten M500 is a compact Pocket PC Phone with a 2.8" transflective display. It's similar in size to the Treo 650 and close in size to the JAM, which means it can fit in a roomy pocket and you won't feel like you're holding a brick to your head when in conversation. The device runs Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition for Pocket PC Phones and word is that E-TEN will offer a Windows Mobile 5 upgrade later this year. We hope that holds true, and it certainly gives the M500 a leg up over the HTC Magician (JAM/ XDA mini / MDA Compact) which won't be receiving that upgrade.
The E-TEN M500 is a capable and full-featured smartphone with a 400 MHz processor, 64 megs of RAM, 128 megs of flash ROM, quad band GSM radio, 1.3 megapixel camera with flash, Bluetooth and an SD slot supporting SDIO. It's not offered by US carriers, but rather is sold by importers unlocked for use with any GSM carrier. We received our unit from David Weiniger's Mad Monkey Boy's Gadgets online store, a reasonable and reputable US importer well known for selling the popular i-mate JAM with which the E-TEN M500 competes. For those of you who are new to convergence devices, Pocket PC phones are both full-featured Pocket PCs and cell phones in one. Don't confuse them with MS Smartphones (aka Windows Mobile Smartphones) which are smart by mobile phone standards but lack the Pocket PC's capabilities, touch screen and power. MS smartphones are smaller and look like traditional mobile phones, making them a good fit for those who want a phone-centric design and don't need full blown PDA features. In mid-summer 2005, the E-TEN got a new name: the TORQ P100. This is the same unit but sold under a different name for the US market (it's a marketing thing, not an engineering change). In the Box E-TEN includes a sleek sync cradle (shown above) with a slot to charge a second battery. The cradle has an LED to indicate charging status of the second battery. Also included are a USB sync cable, world charger (both of which can plug into the cradle or directly into the M500), a stereo earbud headset, two software CDs and a rigid fabric and vinyl slip case with belt clip and wrist strap. Design and Ergonomics The E-TEN M500 is one of the few compact Pocket PC Phones. Yes, it still looks like a PDA but compared to full sized unit such as the Siemens SX66, it's downright small. Close in size and shape to the Palm Treo 650, which seems to have hit the sweet spot for size and form factor, the M500 is not overly large for phone use and is much smaller than the mid-size Dell Axim X30 Pocket PC. Like the Treo and the JAM, the E-TEN is relatively narrow which makes it feel good in the hand and look less brick-like than large Pocket PC phones. It's slightly thicker than the JAM and about the same thickness as the Treo, and it feels just right: easy to grip and hold. The M500 is finished in bright silver and black, and looks attractive in a techno sort of way, though it doesn't look an expensive piece of kit. The casing is made of plastic, which is true of many PDAs and phones, with the JAM being one of the few that has a metal casing. We don't usually comment on the stylus, but the M500's is excellent: it's a large, comfy telescoping model that beats the JAM's toothpick by a big margin. The 2.8" display dominates the front face, with a small circular 5-way directional pad flanked by two application buttons and call send and end buttons below. The front application buttons launch contacts (cycles between two speed dial methods and the built-in contacts application with each press of the button) and Home which cycles between the Pocket PC Today Screen and E-TEN's M-Desk launcher. You can of course re-assign these buttons as you see fit. |
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The sides are made of lightly pebbled black plastic which helps keep the device in hand, and you'll find the camera button, volume up/down slider, voice command button and reset button on the left side. There are no controls on the right side. The SD slot and IR port live up top under a shiny black plastic cap, and the phone's internal antenna resides under the cap. The upper back area houses the camera lens, flash and self portrait mirror while the lower section slides off with a press of the latch to reveal the user replaceable Lithium Ion rechargeable battery. The combination sync and charger port is on the bottom of the unit and the stylus silo is located on the bottom right side of the device. The earpiece speaker which is used for voice calls, is located above the display and the mic is on the bottom of the M500. The phone has a rear firing speaker which is used for system sounds and speaker phone. Two LEDs flank the display and indicate Bluetooth status, mobile phone radio status (blinking green means the phone is turned on and has reception), notifications (blinking red) and charging status (red while charging).
i-mate JAM, E-TEN M500, Palm Treo 650 and Dell Axim X30 |
Thickness comparison: i-mate JAM (top) and M500. |
The Audiovox PPC-6601 (Sprint version of the Blue Angel) and the E-TEN M500. Photo taken with the Sony Ericsson S710a!. |
You can sync and charge the M500 by placing it in the included cradle or by plugging the cables directly into the PDA. The charger plugs into a connector on the USB cable which then plugs into the E-TEN's sync port or cradle connector. This means you'll need to bring both the sync cable and charger when traveling. The M500 supports USB charging as well.
Though E-TEN says the device has USB host, they do not sell the required cable to connect a USB device to the sync port on the M500, and the spare USB port on the cradle does not offer USB host functionality.
Phone Features and Reception
The E-TEN M500 is a quad band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM phone that will work anywhere in the world where GSM service is available. It's unlocked which means you can use it with any carrier's SIM. Like all current GSM Pocket PC phones, the device has GPRS class 10 for data (no EDGE, no 3G). Though GPRS isn't the fastest kid on the block by a long shot, surfing the web using the included Pocket Internet Explorer isn't painful, perhaps because the M500's fast Pocket IE rendering time helped speed things up.
The Phone Settings applet allows you to switch between 900/1800 MHz (Europe and Asia) and 850/1900 (US), though the phone seems to work when left on the wrong setting and likely auto detects the available bands. The E-TEN offers two forms of speed dial, one of which is basically the traditional kind that can hold up to 99 numbers (unassigned slots are filled with most recently called numbers, ordered by how frequently you've called them) and another called Index Dial which shows you each letter of the alphabet. Tap on a letter to quickly see all the contacts whose first names start with that letter. This is much faster than scrolling through your Contacts list, though you have that option as well.
Phone Settings allow you to set the ring tone (WAV, MIDI, MP3) and several nice tunes by Russian classical composers are included along with the standard Windows Mobile phone ring tones. The device provides settings for call barring, caller ID, call forwarding, call waiting, voice mail and SMS settings, as do all Pocket PC phones. E-TEN includes a call filtering app which you can use to selectively receive or reject calls from specified numbers. The device supports manual network selection (if allowed by your carrier), and has an auto-answer option (select how many seconds to wait before the phone automatically answers calls if desired). In addition, the phone offers picture caller ID and distinctive ring (called In Call Recognition) which allows you to set a specific ring tone for any number in Contacts.
In addition, the M500 comes with Voice Commander, a voice recognition system made by Cyberon (also used on the upcoming ASUS P505 Pocket PC phone). Voice Commander works for voice dialing (by name or digits) and issuing voice commands to the PDA (i.e.: "start calendar", "today's appointments" or "what can I say?") to bring up help and a list of possible commands. Voice Commander works well if you do not talk directly into the mic but rather hold the device at a distance of 8 to 12 inches in most settings to get the best results. The true delight of Voice Commander is that it works over Bluetooth headsets! That is a rarity among Windows Mobile devices. E-TEN has enhanced the standard Pocket PC Buttons control panel applet so you can assign the Bluetooth headset's multifunction button to start Voice Commander (or any other program for that matter). This is the first Pocket PC phone we've seen that allows you to assign a function to something other than the Pocket PC's own buttons. Of course Voice Commander also works with wired headsets including the wired stereo earbud headset that comes with the E-TEN, and it requires no training since it uses true voice recognition rather than recorded voice tags.
How about call quality and reception? Call quality, both incoming and outgoing is excellent. Calls are loud and clear with very good voice reproduction. The device's earpiece volume is louder than many recent mobile phones such as this year's Nokias and the GSM Treo 650. Call volume and clarity through the wired headset and Bluetooth headsets we tested was also quite good. The speakerphone is plenty loud as well. To turn on speaker phone on Pocket PC phones, press and hold the green call send button while in a call. We tested the phone in the US on both the 850 MHz (AT&T SIM) and 1900 MHz (T-Mobile SIM). On the 850 MHz band used by AT&T and Cingular in many areas (they are one company now but tower integration isn't yet complete) reception is good, with a strong signal, no noise and no dropped calls. The top RF phones beat the M500 but not by a huge margin, and the phone should be fine for those who rely primarily on this band. 1900 MHz band reception with T-Mobile is weak and the phone generally reports a low signal looking at the bars and using Hudson Mobile's IP Dashboard to measure signal strength. In areas with very good signal strength the phone is OK, though it gets about 20% less signal than many other phones in the same area. In areas with marginal coverage, forget about it: calls will break up and drop. If you live in a city with strong 1900 MHz coverage, the phone could work for you, but if you live or travel to places with fair to weak 1900 MHz coverage, forget about it. However, the TORQ branded version of the phone gets much better 1900 MHz reception and is suitable for T-Mobile.
Horsepower and Performance
The E-TEN M500 is one heck of a little powerhouse by Windows Mobile phone standards. It has an ARM compatible 400 MHz Samsung S3C 2440 processor that beats out the Intel XScale processors used in the competing Siemens SX66 (and CMDA equivalent Audiovox PPC-6601 offered by Sprint) and the i-mate JAM by a small margin on almost every test. Of course it smokes the HP iPAQ 6315 which has a 168 MHz Texas Instruments processor. The same Samsung processor is used in the HP iPAQ rx3715 Pocket PC and the 300 MHz version is used in the HP iPAQ rx3115 (these are PDAs only, no phone). The CPU is 100% compatible with ARM and XScale software and apparently can run a bit faster than the XScale with some good device engineering and optimization. The M500 not only benchmarks well but it feels fast and responsive using menus, running Pocket Word and Excel, playing videos and surfing using Pocket IE.
The device has 64 megs of RAM, of which 54.3 megs is available to the user. It has 128 megs of flash ROM (persistent memory that survives a hard reset but is a tad slower than RAM), with 83.37 megs available to store programs, data, backup files and anything else you like. That's approximately 135 megs of available total memory, which is quite good for a Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone. We particularly like the large flash ROM partition since that area survives the dreaded hard reset and complete battery drains. Should you need to wipe out everything you've stored in flash ROM, E-TEN includes a utility to format the flash ROM area, a rare find on PDAs.
For expansion, the M500 has Bluetooth, IR and an SD slot that supports SDIO. You can use memory cards and I/O card such as SanDisk's SD WiFI card and SD WiFi + 256 megs memory card WiFi with the E-TEN. And you can use Bluetooth and IR folding keyboards with the M500 as well, not to mention Bluetooth headsets and Bluetooth GPS.
Display, Gaming and Multimedia The M500 has an impressive 2.8" transflective color display that's crisp, color saturated and much brighter than the i-mate JAM's. At half brightness, the M500 is brighter than the JAM set to full brightness (see comparison photo, right). The screen is relatively color neutral, with a hint of warm color bias compared to the JAM's blue bias. The device supports both portrait and landscape modes and has a shortcut icon on the taskbar to quickly change screen orientations. Given the display's sharpness and brightness, you shouldn't have any problem reading text despite the small 2.8" size. While the screen looks great when watching videos, it is a bit small. Personally, I find that the standard 3.5" PDA and portable media player screens have the smallest usable size before actors in a long shot remind you of ants. But that is a matter of personal preference, and nothing beats being able to watch full DVD movies ripped to the Pocket PC when making a cross country flight. However, if you're a hard core video fan, you might want to consider the full-sized Siemens SX66 and its larger 3.5" display. Sound volume in call through the speakerphone and system sounds are loud and clear using the built-in speaker. Like all Pocket PCs, the E-TEN can play MP3s using the included Windows Media Player 10. For best sound you'll want to use the included 2.5mm stereo headset rather than the integrated mono speaker. You can control system and ring volume separately by tapping the speaker icon at the top of the Today Screen and you can adjust call volume using the slider on the side of the phone when in a call. In addition, the M500 has a mic gain settings applet with separate settings for phone, voice recorder and Bluetooth. The E-TEN supports MIDI, WAV and MP3 ringtones (put ringtones in the Windows/rings folder). Like all Pocket PCs, it can record voice notes. Games work well on the E-TEN M500, though the d-pad is a tad small for comfy action gaming. Game compatibility and performance is good and we tested several popular games including Sky Force, Bejeweled 2 and Trivial Pursuit. Clearly the CPU and graphics are up to current games. Games which require more than two buttons will be a challenge on the M500 which like most Pocket PC phones, has only two front application buttons. BetaPlayer is
an extremely fast open source free video player that supports
MPEG1, DivX, AVI, ASF and WMV files. BetaPlayer played back "The
Chosen", (a neat BMW flick with Clive Owen) which is a
4:26 minute long, 10 meg MPEG1 file recorded at 320 x 240,
308 kb/s, with benchmarks of: Those are very good results, competing well with the Blue Angel and JAM as well as other current non-phone Pocket PCs. Benchmarks We were quite surprised at how well the E-TEN M500 did in benchmarks using Spb Benchmark. The unit narrowly beat the powerhouse Siemens SX66 and the JAM in most tests. It had no problem besting the iPAQ 6315 which runs on a much slower processor than competing units and in the case when it did lose to a competing unit, the spread was generally very small. E-TEN gets a lot out of the Samsung processor and we're impressed. Yet the unit is stable and battery life is good by Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone standards. |
The JAM and E-TEN:
notice the brighter display on the E-TEN M500.
Benchmark Results
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Battery Life The E-TEN has a 1440 mAh Lithium Ion rechargeable, user replaceable battery. That's a good capacity battery by Pocket PC phone standards, especially for a device with a smaller display (the display is one of the biggest power consumers). The unit can be charged in the cradle, which also has a slot for a second battery, or you can plug the cables directly into the M500. However, the power cable must first be plugged into a pigtail on the USB sync cable which terminates in a proprietary connector on the M500. This means you must bring both the USB cable and charger with you when traveling. The M500 also supports USB charging. The unit does not have a feature which allows you to step down processor speed to conserve power, but it does have two interesting display power management settings, one of which sets the backlight based on remaining power and the other which sets backlight based on how long the device has been idle. How are battery runtimes? Good by Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone standards. The device can make nearly two days on a charge with moderate use and longer with light use. In our two day test with backlight set to 50% (that's pretty bright on the E-TEN), we surfed the web for 1:45 over GPRS, talked for 30 minutes on the phone, played Sky Force and Bejeweled for 45 minutes, used the PIM features about 20 times, watched two 10 minute videos and played with various other apps for an hour over the course of two days. By the end of the second day, the battery was at 25%, which is when you get the first low battery warning. When we used the device lightly, it lasted 3 days on a charge (20 minutes call time/day, Bluetooth on but not used for calls), 20 minutes GPRS/day, a few PIM lookups per day. The unit can play MP3s with the screen off for 6.3 hours before hitting the 25% mark. If you're expecting standard feature phone runtimes, you won't be excited, but this is good for a Pocket PC phone and compares well with the JAM. Camera The E-TEN M500 has a 1.3 megapixel camera with LED flash capable of shooting still shots and videos. The maximum photo resolution is 1280 x 960, with options for 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 176 x 144. The camera can save files in JPEG and BMP formats and has 2x digital zoom. When taking videos, you'll choose from 3GP or BT1 file formats (the manual says MP4 but our unit shot in BT1 and renamed the file extension to MP4 on our desktop didn't trick our stable of MP4-capable players into playing the video). You can record video with audio at 320 x 240, 176 x 144 or 128 x 96 resolution. The camera app offers a wealth of settings, including white balance, special effects, timer and continuous shooting of photos. The camera viewfinder takes up the entire screen and you can change between portrait and landscape orientation with the tap of a button. If you tap on the wrench icon, large, mostly intuitive settings icons appear circling the screen's perimeter— an interesting and friendly user interface. The camera offers a wizard option which allows you to immediately do a variety of things with an image you've just taken: send it via MMS, edit it using the included Image Maker application, trash it, view it in Multimedia Manager or Frame it using Image Wizard. Photos are average by PDA and phone standards, besting earlier JAM ROM versions, though the most recent JAM ROMs have improved camera quality to the point of making it a close call. Outdoor and well-lit pictures do have a distinct purple cast, requiring a little color correction using your favorite image editing program. The camera doesn't do well in low light, with plenty of noise in shots, though the flash does help when shooting subjects that are in close range. The flash can be manually disabled. The E-TEN is slow saving files to an SD card (we used a very fast Lexar SD card as our save destination) at highest resolution compared to the JAM, and there is a bit of shutter lag. There is no shutter lag when saving photos to RAM, and files are saved faster. Video quality is quite good by mobile standards and the accompanying audio is decent. Below: sample photos shot a 1280 x 960 on auto settings. Click on a photo to see the full size unedited original.
Software Like all Pocket PCs running Windows Mobile, Pocket versions of Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and Outlook are pre-installed in ROM. Other pre-installed Microsoft apps include Pictures (image viewer), a voice recorder, Terminal Services, Pocket MSN, MSN Messenger, Solitaire, Jawbreaker, ActiveSync and Calculator. Windows Media Player 10 is included and you'll use that for MP3 and movie playback, though you can use your favorite 3rd party application for those tasks as well. ActiveSync and Outlook for Windows PCs is included on a CD, as is a 200 page PDF manual and a link to download IR modem software drivers for the PC on a second disk.
For multimedia, you get an image editor called Image Maker; Image Wizard, an app that puts frames around photos; the camera application and Multimedia Manager which plays back videos taken with the smartphone and functions as an image viewer. It works with JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG still images and has a slide show feature with transitions and audio. All integrate with the included MMS client. Phone apps include an MMS composer that worked well with our US carrier settings for T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless, a call filter, SIM Manager, SIM Tool Kit, the speed dial app described earlier and wireless modem for using the phone as a modem for a PC over Bluetooth or IR (we couldn't get that feature working, as described below). And for voice dialing you get Voice Commander which works directly with the handset, over wired headsets and Bluetooth headsets.
Conclusion For the price and size, this unit packs a lot of features! It out-classes its main competitor, the i-mate JAM in many respects: it has more memory, slightly faster benchmarks, a brighter display and a somewhat better camera with an LED flash. It comes with voice command software that works with Bluetooth headsets too, has more stable and full-featured Bluetooth software (though we couldn't get DUN working), and an excellent stylus. The included cradle is stylish and has a slot to charge a second battery. Battery capacity and life are good by Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone standards. The device is compact, and it's the same size as the Treo and a little thicker than the JAM. The internal antenna means the device will fit more easily in your pocket and flight attendants won't have a fit when you whip it out during a flight. The software bundle is useful and extends the functionality of the PDA and phone features nicely without bogging it down or causing performance and compatibility problems. Build quality is good with no creaking and all seams mating perfectly. It supports SDIO for those of you who wish to use a WiFi card. The only negatives are poor 1900 MHz reception in fair to weak signal areas (850 MHz is good however), you'll need to bring the USB sync cable with you on the road to use the charger, and the lack of integrated WiFi (though given the price and size, we can forgive E-TEN for that). However, the TORQ branded version of the phone has good 1900 MHz reception. Web site: www.etencorp.com List Price: Available only from importers, unlocked for use with any carrier's SIM. $549 from Mad Monkey Boy who provided us with our unit.
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