SPV M5000 3G Phone Review

3G comes to Pocket PC, and as if that isn’t enough, the SPV M5000 from Orange also has a fancy Tablet PC style design
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F you sometimes feel that the whole smartphone thing gets taken a bit far, you might want to look away at this point, because what we have in our hot little hands is a device that takes the smartphone concept further than it has been to date.
Orange’s SPV M5000 is almost a miniature laptop computer – in fact, to be precise, it’s almost a miniature Tablet PC, albeit one with built in 3G communications.

If you aren’t an Orange customer, don’t fret. Both O2 and T-Mobile also offer this device under different names (the Xda Exec and the MDA Pro respectively), and you can even get it Sim-free in the form of the JASJAR from i-mate.

We’ve not seen 3G in a Pocket PC before. The closest you’ve been able to get to something this sophisticated has been using a 3G data card in a PC or a 3G smartphone as a PC modem. But that’s changed, and what we see with the SPV M5000 is 3G meets smartphone meets Pocket PC with the added lure of a rather large built-in keyboard to augment the handwriting recognition and soft keyboard built into the touch-sensitive, 640x480-pixel, 16-bit screen.

It probably goes without saying that this is a bit of a large device. You aren’t going to want to take it with you on a night out – expect to get a slimline handset for that particular role. It barely fits into a jacket pocket, and is probably going to be most at home in a briefcase or bag.

You are most likely to feel the tug of this smartphone at your bank balance if you are a professional or a serious data user. For you it has an awful lot to offer.
That keyboard, for starters. It’s full QWERTY with a separate number row and some dedicated buttons for things like launching Pocket Internet Explorer

3G means fast data downloads and video calls. With Pocket Internet Explorer on board and a landscape (wide) format for the screen you can view web pages pretty well. There are a couple of options that reformat web pages to help you make the most of the screen space available. Email can be handled by the SPV M5000 too, as well as SMS and MMS of course.

There’s a camera built into the back of the casing with a 1.3 megapixel lens which you can use to shoot stills and video, but it is the other camera, next to the screen, that is most interesting, as this is what you use for video calls over 3G. If you are familiar with Pocket PC phone edition you’ll know that there is an on-screen tappable dialler. This has been augmented with a video call button so it is easy to make calls.

There have been plenty of attempts to embed keyboards into PDAs – some more successful than others, we might add. But nowhere have we seen anything quite so clever as what’s on offer here.

If you’ve ever seen a Tablet PC, you’ll get the idea immediately because the SPC M5000 is like a mini Tablet PC. Lift the lid, and ohmygawsh, there’s a keyboard. Swivel the lid through 180° and lay it flat, and the keyboard is gone, leaving you with a more standard-looking Pocket PC.
As you swivel, the screen rotates, so that it is in landscape (wide) format when you are using the keyboard, or portrait (tall) format when you have the keyboard hidden. Icons on the touch-sensitive screen let you do this swivelling manually too.

The SPV M5000 runs Windows Mobile 5.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system for smartphones and PDAs. Among other things this adds two soft-menu buttons very like those found on phones, which you can tap to access options within different software. We liked them – they make getting around within applications fast and easy.

Among the other software features on board are Word Mobile and Excel Mobile. These can handle native files so you could in theory get documents emailed to you, do a bit of editing while on the move, then whizz your edited versions back to the office via email.

Don’t expect to see the standard Pocket PC Today screen when you open the lid of the SPV M5000. Orange has its own front page, which provides you with shortcuts to things like contacts, messaging, the internet and your diary. There are four shortcuts you can assign to any software you like, as well as a tappable icon that lets you turn the built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi applications on and off.

There’s no denying that this is a very clever device, and the swivel mechanism feels sturdy. But be warned: the keyboard adds a lot of weight over and above what you’d normally expect from a Pocket PC, and while it is good, it is not big enough to cater for anyone needing to type lots of stuff. Emails and a bit of document editing is probably its limit.

Also, we were never all that comfortable making voice calls with this beastie – it’s just far too large to hold to the ear and not make you look like some kind of idiot. You’ll need a Bluetooth headset if you don’t want to look like a chump.
Finally there’s no catch to secure the lid in place so you are going to need to avoid having this baby bobbling about in your bag where it might get prised open and damaged.

This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.

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