Vodafone v1620 (Vodafone 1620)

Available now
23rd April 2005

The Vodafone v1620 is an upgrade of the Vodafone VPA III model, and is a Windows-based smartphone with a sliding QWERTY keypad, large screen and WiFi.

Manufactured for Vodafone by HTC of Taiwan, the v1620 follows in the footsteps of other HTC models and comes up with no real surprises. Inside is a 520MHz processor, 128Mb RAM, 240x320 display in 65,000 colours and MMC expandable memory. It's a quad-band GSM phone with GRPS and Bluetooth, but no 3G support. At 210 grams, this is a heavy device and it's large too, at 125x72x19mm. Talktime is very limited, at a maximum of three hours.

The rest of the v1620's specifications are pretty typical too, with the Microsoft Pocket PC 2003 Phone Edition operating system, "Pocket" versions of Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and Outlook for email access, plus a viewer for PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat documents.

Vodafone are promoting the v1620 with their "push email" service, which will be available soon in Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, France (through SFR) and Finland (through Elisa).

So far, this all seems pretty typical, but Vodafone is very cagey about details of the "push email" service. Is it Blackberry? Something else? And there is no intention stated to launch the service in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden or any other Vodafone territory. Indeed, in the UK the Vodafone VPA models have been completely absent.

The UK in particular is a very bad situation for Vodafone - for this type of device, the company still has no Windows smartphones in its catalogue (although some independents are selling HTC manufactered handsets on the network). T-Mobile in particular is taking corporate customers away from Vodafone because of their weakness in this market.

The v1620 is certainly a useful device, but there's very little chance of seeing it anytime soon in the UK. Customers in Germany can expect to see it very soon, however and a straight replacement for the VPA III model.

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