Orange SPV M500 Confirmed

Discontinued
16th April 2005

We had our first glimpse of the M500 two months ago - since then the handset's specifications have been firmed up and it appears that there's been a little minor cosmetic tweaking. Orange say that the M500 will start shipping from late April in some regions.

It's a slightly chunky looking variant of the HTC Magician platform, sold variously as the i-Mate JAM and T-Mobile MDA Compact. Looking like a traditional PDA device, the Orange SPV M500 is actually about 25% lighter than a standard PDA-style smartphone but it still comes with 240x320 pixel display in 65,000 colours and pen-based input.

At the heart of the Orange SPV M500 is a 416MHz Intel Xscale processor with 64Mb of memory included as standard. This can be expanded using SD/MMC cards in the usual way. On the back of the M500 is a 1.3 megapixel digital camera capable of stills photos and video capture.

The Orange SPV M500 runs the Microsoft Mobile Pocket PC operating system and comes with pocket versions of Outlook (for email), Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. It can playback MP3, MPEG4 and WMV media via the M500's stereo headset. There's Java support too.

This is a pretty standard tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 device with GPRS which can be connected to a PC using Bluetooth, USB or infra-red connections. At 150 grams and 108x58x18mm this is remarkably compact. Talktime is quoted at 2.5-5 hours with 7 days standby.

In all honesty, there's very little difference between this handset and the other HTC Magician variants, and PDA-style phones are not for everyone either - but if you've been put off by the sheer size and weight of other Windows smartphones of this type, then the Orange SPV M500 is worth considering.

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