Friday, January 20, 2006

The HTC Athena is now the HTC Prophet?


I've been checking the Prophet out for a while now. My first thoughts were - it's a great phone with a superb set of features, but -dammit- it's only got a 200Mhz processor. Well I've got some good news. Firstly, the elusive HTC Athena (as specified on the "HTC roadmap" document) is actually now the Prophet (after perhaps a re-name), and not the XDA Atom or whatever.

The second point is, that the 200Mhz processor is not an Intel Bulevarde CPU, but a Texas Instruments OMAP 850 CPU. What this means is that while not as fast as a 400Mhz Bulevarde, it vastly outperforms a 200Mhz Intel chip, and has less battery-drain. The one point stopping this phone from being nearly perfect (apart from the lack of a flash) would be if the CPU couldn't handle video. Time will tell on this one.

Other bonuses are built in WiFi, Bluetooth stereo headset support, a 2 mega-pixel camera, comparable in size to the HTC Wizard, and SD-IO card support. Oh yeah, and it looks AMAZING.
I can see this as being a worthy successor to the Wizard/refresh, a powerful, excellent all-rounder.
Another small (tiny) factor is that the layout of the buttons doesn't look too conducive to gaming - for emulation in landscape mode for example - but I can't imagine it to be a huge upset to anyone.
And one of the reasons for this too, is that in running Windows Mobile 5, the device supports one-handed navigation.
Perhaps the best new feature of Windows Mobile 5, is that the memory is no longer volatile. So if you find yourself maxing out your battery, with no charger in sight, your data won't magically disappear in a few hours.

Here's a brief rundown on the specs:

  • Quad band

  • GSM, GPRS, EDGE

  • 200MHz Texas Instruments (fast) CPU

  • W-LAN 802.11b & 802.11g

  • Bluetooth A2DP (stereo Headset profile)

  • 2.8" QVGA touchscreen

  • 2 mega-pixel camera (no flash :( )

  • SD(IO)/MMC Slot

  • Mini USB

  • 1200 mAh battery

  • FM radio?

  • Looks amazing


So yeah, I pretty much need this, or my life will end.
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