UBiQUiO might not be a company that you’re familiar with, and in all honesty neither were we until recently. However, UBiQUiO is a part of online retailer Expansys, or rather a subsidiary I should say. The UBiQUiO brand has been around for almost seven years now, although the venture into Windows Mobile devices and hardware in general is much more recent. Besides the 503G which we’ll be looking at today, UBiQUiO offers a couple of older Windows Mobile devices, but it’s also a serious player in the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) market and has a Skype phone and Bluetooth keyboard on offer as well.
It might not seem like a lot of products, but considering that UBiQUiO has only been doing hardware for about a year, it’s still a pretty good repertoire. The designs are in many cases their own, or at least exclusive to UBiQUiO. As with so many other companies out there today, it’s easy to buy a finished design and customise the software as long as it meets your quality standards. There’s no shortage of mobile phone manufacturers, although many of them don’t sell their products directly to end users.
But enough about the company, let’s take a closer look at the device itself. The 503G is using one of the less well used form factors when it comes to Windows Mobile devices, as it’s got a fairly small 2.4-inch horizontal LCD touch screen with a resolution of 240x320. Below the screen is a full backlit QWERTY keyboard, and between that and the screen is a set of navigation keys, but we’ll get back to those in a little bit.
The hardware is rather impressive with a 520MHz Marvell XScale PXA 270 CPU which has been combined with a Qualcomm 6280 3G/HSDPA chip. Further to this, UBiQUiO has added 96MB of RAM and 192MB of ROM, although most of the ROM is already taken up by Windows Mobile 6 Professional and the pre-installed applications. Oddly enough, a lot of the RAM memory seems to be used up by default, especially compared to devices with only 64MB of RAM. The same goes for the ROM, but this will apparently be fixed in an upcoming update from UBiQUiO, so be sure to check out their website for this.
