It’s been a few months since we reviewed our first handset from GIGABYTE’s GSmart division, that being the t600. With the launch of the GSmart i350 last month, we thought we’d bring you a review of it as well. The i350 is running Windows Mobile 6 Professional and the form factor is similar to the t600 with the same excellent 480x640 260,000 colour 6-inch LCD display.
Size wise the two are also quite similar with the i350 measuring 110x54x18mm (HxWxD) which makes it 0.5mm thinner and 1.5mm narrower than the t600. It’s also 10g lighter at 130g. The shape is similar as well with it being quite square, but it’s not uncomfortable to hold. Our only real gripe with using it is the fact that GIGABYTE didn’t add any soft menu buttons. This means that you end up touching the bottom of the screen quite often, since you won’t want to be using the stylus all the time.
The buttons consist of a four way navigation pad with a select button in the middle, a green call button, a red end call/cancel button, a Windows start menu button and an OK button. On the left hand side is also a volume up/down slider while on the bottom right hand side is the camera shutter button. You’ll also find a proprietary headset connector behind a flap on the right hand side.
The i350 shares the Marvell PXA270 CPU with the t600 and it’s even clocked at the same speed, 520MHz. It’s great to see that GSmart sticks with 256MB of storage memory, although we’d like to see the system memory upgraded from 64MB, as once the device is up and running you only have about 20MB of this at your disposal.
The battery is also the same 1,300mAh unit, but it seems like the talk time has been upped to 4.5h and the standby time to 160h. The i350 also features Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and a mini USB 2.0 connector at the bottom. There’s no mention of EDR for the Bluetooth connectivity, but this could just be an occlusion on the website as we didn’t get a spec sheet with the review sample.
Other improvements seem to cover the integrated 2 MegaPixel camera with auto focus and an LED flash, which seems to take better pictures than the t600 and also seems to focus faster. It’s still far from great, but if you use max resolution and resize the pictures, they’re actually usable.
