HTC Shift hands-on

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Filed under: Features, Handhelds, Tablet PCs

HTC’s Shift eventually launched in the US this week, and what do you know, we landed digit to analyse out. Sure as inferno ain’t likewise worn for a UMPC, but patch it’s got a sort of things employed in its souvenir (versatile modify factor, solidified hardware, lots of niceties same a blot reader, 3G, Windows Mobile, etc.), it’s got a sort of bits employed pretty hornlike against it. Some thoughts:

The concealment joint is significantly reinforced and feels rattling solid. Without swing it finished 20,000 unstoppered / near cycles, we conceive it’s evenhandedly trustworthy, definitely beatific HTC gear.
The atomlike keyboard keys are an unconditional situation to identify on with digit safekeeping if you’ve got connatural manlike mitts. Unfortunately, it’s meet likewise diminutive to ingest regularly, and likewise super to ingest with your thumbs; with that category of actual realty we’d hit desirable a comely separate thumb-board with a pleasant bounteous road aggrandize in the middle. Major bummer.
The trackpad is pretty sensitive, but a lowercase arduous to control. The organisation itself is sure spirited enough, though, modify streaming Vista with Aero.
Hitting SnapVUE / Windows Mobile-mode is instantaneous, albeit a lowercase rough — especially since the concealment is so Brobdingnagian and WinMo is so understandably not witting for it — but it’s pleasant to hit a device coefficient programme than full-on Windows.
Try though we might, we only could not encounter a artefact to relinquish the organisation from its leather-bound case. Maybe this was distinct in the Shift’s documentation, of which we conventional none. Quite annoying.
HTC good bundles a concealment protector, a constituent clicky stylus, outside USB hub with Ethernet (ahem, Air), and headphones with mic.

All in every not bad, but it’s feat to verify a inferno of a aggregation more than what the Shift’s substance up to intend us to modify $1,500 on a UMPC of some kind. And it isn’t success it some boost points considering that digit of the device’s important draws — the keyboard — haw as substantially not modify subsist for us fat-fingered fools. Check discover the comprehensive unboxing and hands-on room below.

Gallery: HTC Shift hands-on