Review: The HTC S740 (Rose) Windows Mobile Standard Phone

May 4, 2009 | By Admin In Technology |

[This is a joint review between Doug Goldring of JAMM and Judie Lipsett ofGear Diary; it will appear simultaneously on both sites. Doug's comments are in black, and Judie's are blue italics]

The last time I used a non-touch screen version of Windows Mobile was the Motorola Q. It ran Windows Mobile 5, and I quickly learned that the interface was nothing short of terrible. That phone lasted about a week before I declared the phone completely unusable and gave it away to a friend. That was then. This is now: Windows Mobile 6.1. And a lot has changed.

I’ve been using the operating system formerly known as Smartphone for years, starting with the HTC Tornado (I-Mate SP5m) in 2005. That was followed by the Motorola Q, the HTC STR TRK, the HTC 710 (Vox), the Samsung Blackjack, the Motorola Q9, the Samsung SGH-i620 , the Samsung Blackjack II, the Treo 500v, the HTC S740 – AKA Rose, and more recently the Pantech Matrix Pro.

I have never felt that even the earliest Smartphone interface was terrible, in fact I generally found Smartphone to be a rock solid OS when compared to Pocket PC, as it required far fewer restarts. Over the years I have enjoyed watching the Smartphone (now called Standard) platform mature. With that said, I think that your bad experience with Smartphone was due to the Motorola Q being such a dog.

So, right off the bat, you can see that Judie and I are coming at this from completely different perspectives. Anyway, I decided the time had come to give a non-touch screen device another try. And what better device to check out than the HTC S740?

I agree that for anyone unsure of whether a non-touch Windows Mobile phone would work for them, the S740 is a great place to start.

Let’s take a look.