HTC MOBILE: HTC P3470

HTC P3470

HTC seems to be positioning the P3470 as a GPS navigation device that makes phone calls, rather than a smartphone with maps. The P3470 comes bundled with Co-Pilot 7 navigation software and an on-board GPS chipset. While the P3470 will fit the bill while you're speeding through the city listening to the turn-by-turn directions, don't expect the P3470 to match this speed with lightning fast data transfers.

Unlike every HTC smartphone released in the last 12 months the P3470 is only a tri-band 2G handset. While the success of 2G BlackBerrys suggest that this fact alone may not guarantee commercial failure for the P3470, there's little doubt the market is crying out for 3G handsets. The lack of mobile data speeds in BlackBerrys is often offset by the inclusion of Wi-Fi, but there is no such consolation here. The P3470 is just not made to surf the Web in a timely fashion.

The P3470 features the same software suite as others in the Touch family. Running onWindows Mobile 6, users have access to Mobile Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), Internet Explorer, and Windows Live Messenger, amongst others. Strangely, the P3470 runs on a processor with half the clock speed of its counterparts; a 200MHz OMAP 850 chip with 128MB RAM.