HTC S740

Expected September 2008
26th August 2008
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This strange looking device is the HTC S740, a Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone with both a standard numeric keypad and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

The HTC S740 follows on from last year's S730, a very similarly specified device but one which we roundly criticised for being astoundingly ugly. Well, there's no doubt that the S740 looks different with styling copied from the HTC Touch Diamond, but the result is that the styling may not be to everyone's taste.

Underneath the S740's radical exterior and unusual sliding QWERTY keyboard, the S740 is a conventional non-touchscreen device with a 2.4" QVGA screen, 3.2 megapixel fixed focus camera, video calling, quad-band GSM plus GPRS and EDGE data, UMTS and HSDPA support in the 900 and 2100 MHz bands, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, and microSD expandable memory. The HTC S740 also has built-in GPS / A-GPS and an FM radio, all running on top of the Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard operating system.

Internal memory consists of 256MB of Flash and a useful 256MB RAM. The S740's processor is a Qualcomm MSM7225 running at 528MHz which should be broadly similar to the speed of the CPU in the Touch Diamond.

This is quite a tall, slim device at 116 x 43 x 16mm, and quite heavy at 140 grams, about midway between the HTC Touch Diamond and HTC Touch Pro. Talktime is up to 5 hours on 3G, 6 hours on GSM with around 16 days maximum standby time.

Overall, this is a bit of an odd device. There are very few handsets that we can think of that have this keyboard arrangement, and these days most Windows Mobile devices are touchscreen handsets. But then again, we can see that the keyboard will be useful for many people even with the more limited display.

HTC said that the S740 should be available from September, but did not give any guidance on price.