Introduction, packaging
I don’t know what’s with me nowadays, I might be growing old. I’ve put up with the fact that I don’t know the series numbering of mobile phones and so I just nod my head and smile when I receive a phone, as I haven’t the slightest idea what do I get. There has been no example, however, of me not knowing the type of a PDA, and now here it is: SpeedShop announced me that here’s HTC Sedna, I can take it. And I’ve just kept blinking and upon receipt I realized: this is Sirius.
As a matter of fact this has been the codename of P6500 until its launch; somehow still Sedna is the label on the box. There is still some consistency in this naming, as Sirius is the dog-star, that is the main star of the Canis Major constellation and it’s four times brighter than a conventional major star. Sedna is also an astronomical concept, as to the best of my knowledge it is the furthest object in our stellar system. By the way it’s a member of the Oort cloud, something scientists couldn’t observe until the present day, its existence is proven only by comets getting near the Sun. This is so interesting that I put a picture of it in the review.
The real Sedna
Based on this information the name-change wasn’t illogic, as P6500 is at least as far from other HTC devices than Sedna is from Earth. Sirius, on the other hand, should have been left some kind of multimedia device, as the adjective “bright” doesn’t match at all such a large brick this is. Packaging is the usual, demanding box with a magnetic lid; sync cable, charger, stereo headset, textile case, backup stylus and display-protection foil included.
Exterior
At a first look, Sedna looks like some kind of industrial stuff. It’s extremely huge, weighs 220 grams and has a size of 137.4 x 72.9 x 20.5 mm, so we won’t be carrying it in our shirt’s pocket, that’s sure. Its design is interesting, to say the least, it has some strange shape with unusually placed buttons. Not even the use of materials is targeted at the needs of a conventional used, as the hard, plastic cover is really massive and the display is much more resistant too, than usual – of course this won’t hurt the everyday user either.
On top of its front, under the HTC logo, we can find the speaker, surrounded by two shortcut keys. In the middle we can see the touchscreen display that has a diagonal of 3.5” and a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. Basically everything’s all right with quality and we can cope with the size too, which counts as ultra-large nowadays. My personal opinion is, however, that the screen should have VGA resolution, as for example E-TEN puts a 480 x 640 display in almost every device of theirs. On the bottom there are six buttons in an interesting layout, with a 5-way d-pad in the center and a fingerprint-reader below it.
We can observe on the back that the guys at HTC tried to force something stylish on it, but the general impression is something like a Russian lumberjack dressed in ballerina clothes – so it’s not really perfect. The most conspicuous part is the camera with everything that goes with it: large lens, flash, a label with the camera’s specs and then comes the slider for taking off the back (this has a large padlock icon) and the GPS label which hides the connector for the external antenna. There is some rubber in the bottom part too, with a functionless plastic grating below it: the manual says nothing about it. Design flaw?
On the top there is an SD socket protected by a hard cover, which is worth mentioning as it makes sure that our precious card won’t ever fall out. There is another slot of the same kind on the right; above this we can find the power button and the hotkey for the Communication Manager with the camera’s exposure button under it. It’s interesting that all of these bring the device back from standby; I think this is a bug, not a feature.
The stylus slot is on the bottom, the pencil itself is a large, non-telescopic one, which is comfortable to use. The HTC ExtUSB port (miniUSB compatible) is on the same side, along with the microphone and the reset gap. On the left there is the place for fastening the wrist strap, the OK button and the jog-dial.
Interior, operating system, fingerprint-reader
The PDA runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional as an operating system, since this is a phone-brick, but we’ll talk about my experience with this a bit later. The CPU is a 400 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200, the size of the RAM/ROM is 2 x 128 MB, but the latter is expanded with a 1 GB NAND flash storage, which is seen as a memory card by the device – if we put cards in the two SD slots, three, that is 3 additional drives appear in the system, I’ve never seen anything like this before. We have 76 MB for running programs by default, and 110 + 971 MB for data storage (the first one is the ROM, the second if the flash memory). Our synthetic benchmark software has been Anton Tomow’s Pocket PC Mark again; let’s see the results:
| Pocket PC Mark v1.03 | ||
| Dhrystone Benchmark (CPU) | 135.27 MIPS | |
| Whetstone Benchmark (CPU) | 5.52 MWIPS | |
| Memory Benchmark | 473.03 points | |
| File system Benchmark | 62.13 points | |
| Graphics Benchmark | 137.66 points | |
The results are just as expected, they are well-balanced. There are no speed issues during use either; scrolling is fast and there is no unnecessary wait when launching applications.
The plastic grating without functions
As I have previously mentioned, X6500 has a fingerprint reader. This has only data protection functions; it cannot be used for quicklaunching programs. We can set the PDA to come back from standby only after checking the fingerprint. We can use more than one finger for this, and the reader recognized my touches at a surprisingly high rate, about 95%. We can also use this method for file-encryption. Theoretically the machine has an anti-theft feature too, so if a thief would steal our PDA it’s enough to send an SMS and the self-destruction mechanism starts up, the proper detonation is assured by 5 grams of C4. Okay, that’s not true, only the data is erased, at least in theory – I didn’t have the opportunity of testing this feature.
The reader only recognizes fingers dipped in spinach
Software, phone calls, data transfer
The machine has the “TouchFLO” Today theme, which is not only spectacular, but it’s easy to use too. The screen has five virtual buttons, our regular readers can possibly recite the functions of these even if woken up from their dreams, but to make things complete let’s see them one by one. The first icon, with the house, is the main screen, where we can see the current time and missed events. The second one is a speed dialer, the one with the small sun is a weather forecast plugin, the fourth is four launching applications at the press of a button, while the last one is for switching between profiles.
The other TouchFLO features are not installed. There is no rotating cube, no scrolling routine, the zoomable Star menu is left out too and the taskbar icons are of normal size and don’t increase when touched. The task manager is fortunately included, so the X button really closes applications, not just minimizes them.
We have the usual sort of extra software. Communication Manager has the uniform design, it’s very easy to use. In the menu we can find Adobe Reader, the application for formatting the NAND flash memory and the file archiver called Zip. The new office software, OneNote Mobile is not included.
All software regarding phone calls is the factory default. Thus our messaging is handled by Outlook, which supports MMS messages and has an email client too. The phonebook’s size is limited only by the amount of free memory, so it’s practically infinite and there is quite a number of extra fields too.
I had no problems during phone calls, in case I didn’t take into consideration that I’m holding a brick at my ear. The GSM module is quad-banded, for data transfer we can use 3.6 Mbps HSDPA or UMTS, EDGE or GPRS if there is no network coverage. Due to the lack of a frontal camera, our conversation partner won’t see us in case of video calls. WiFI is 802.11b/g compatible, the stereo Bluetooth is of version 2.0, but the ExtUSB connector is only compatible with miniUSB 1.1.
Multimedia
The camera is a 3 megapixel one, has autofocus and in poor light conditions there is the LED flash to help us. Highest available resolution is 2048 x 1536 pixels for photos and 320 x 240 for videos, which can be recorded in MPEG4 or H.263 format. Picture quality is far from perfect, photos are quite “digital”, noise filtering is powerful, but it’s not as “oil-painting-like” as in many Sony Ericsson phones. There are quite a lot of settings; we can alter light metering (spot/average), jpeg compression (in 4 steps) and white balance. We can also set exposure correction in a +/-2 EV range, in 1/2 steps. There is a delayed timer too, and we can add some spice to the pictures with frames.
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Taking pictures wasn’t a completely smooth process, the software seemed buggy. Sedna wanted to save the pictures on the 1 GB storage by default, the process itself took a few seconds, which is no wonder, as some pictures are more than 1 MB large. The problem is, that during saving, the PDA hung many times (in about 50% of the cases) and only soft-reset proved to be helpful. Focusing is fast, but it’s quite interesting, because if we press the exposure button during saving, than after a successful save the phone took another picture, no matter that ~5 seconds have elapsed since I pressed the button. EXIF information is problematic too, as shutter speed has always been 1/2 sec., at least according to the phone.
Our music tracks are played back by the well known Audio Manager, which is a much better software than the factory default Media Player, but it’s not complete from the point of view of functionality as the equalizer and bass boost are missing. We can filter tracks by artist/album/genre/composer, we can use playlists, we can set the tracks as ringtones and we can also edit them if we want to. The included headset is of medium quality, but the loudspeaker is something I have never heard before. Since I like giving awards, I’d like to give Sedna the Worst speaker of all time award. Sound quality is so brutally awful, that I can’t describe it in words, it might be something like a usual quartz game’s speaker, but I’m not sure even about that.
GPS, battery, summary
Sedna has a built-in GPS receiver too, NMEA 0183. I didn’t have any problem using this, so there’s nothing much to tell about it.
The battery’s capacity is 1500 mAh. It kept the little whale alive for 2 days at normal use.
Summary: if we overlook the flaws, we can say that Sedna is a useful machine. Thanks to the fingerprint reader and the data erasure system that works on GSM networks we can always know that our data is safe and we don’t have to fear for the device either, as it has a resistant case. The double SD socket is also welcome, there are no data transfer problems either, but I think it’s a bit embarrassing to make calls with it in 2008; it wouldn’t have been prominent 15 years ago, but today… Furthermore there are the software bugs and the 890 EUR gross price. I liked the idea, but I can recommend it only for those who don’t mind paying in plus for some extra security. The overall concept is good, but the implementation is not the real thing – I have to write this about more and more HTC devices nowadays.
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| HTC Sedna |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
The sample device has been provided by www.speedshop.hu, thanks. Please click here to access the shop.
Specifications
| HTC Sedna (P6500) | ||
 | Technology | GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz UMTS, HSDPA |
| Operating system | Windows Mobile 6 Professional | |
| Size | 137.4 x 72.9 x 20.5 mm | |
| Weight | 220 grams | |
| CPU | 400 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 | |
| ROM/RAM | 120 / 128 MB (110 / 76 MB freely usable) 1 GB NAND flash (971 MB freely usable) | |
| Display | 3.5” diagonal, 240 x 320 pixel resolution, 16 bit color depth touchscreen | |
| Expandability | 2 SD slots (SDHC-compatible) | |
| WiFi | 802.11b/g compatible | |
| Infra / Bluetooth | present / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| GPS receiver | present (NMEA 0183) | |
| Audio | HTC ExtUSB output, microphone, mono speaker | |
| Camera | 3 megapixels, autofocus, flash | |
| Battery | 1500 mAh changeable Li-Ion | |
| Other | Fingerprint reader, data erasable through GSM network | |
