Box Contents

Inside the box you get a Stylus pen, USB sync cable, AC adapter, Headset, Leather case, Getting started CD and Quick start guide.

Design

The Glofiish measures 113.5 x 60.5 x 15.8mm (H x W x D) and weighs 165g, one of its most impressive qualities is the 640 x 480 hi-res 2.8" screen which looks stunning. Your eyes are literally magnetised to the device in an instant.

At the front you have your standard phone buttons and joypad for moving around the Windows Operating system and a few handy shortcuts for quick access to commonly used programs.

To the sides you have a conveniently placed headphone socket, camera shortcut and your volume controls.

On the whole the exterior does look professionally finished but the only downside lies with the flimsy battery cover, which brings the standard down a level.

From an interface perspective E-Ten have customised the Windows Mobile 6 OS to great effect, with a lovely orange front home screen, stacks of useful utilities and the usual array of Windows mobile applications.

Features

The X-800 is certainly brimming with features, for a start you have Bluetooth 2, dual Wi-Fi and 3G HSDPA support, which certainly helps for fast web browsing and we could pick up wireless routers and hotspots easily with the supplied connectivity manager.

You also have a 2MP camera at the back (alongside a dinky mirror for portrait shots) with a 0.3mp camera at the front for 3G video calls. The back camera also comes with a built-in flash that also doubles up as a flash light and its general picture quality was good.

For phone reception you have Quad-band support and during our test conversation it did produce a touch of interference from the speaker, but our recipient thought the conversation was still clear.

The pick of the crop though comes from the supplied SiRF Star-III GPS receiver which we put to the test in good fashion - you will find the results of our findings later on in the review.

Memory

With the Glofiish you get 256MB ROM and 64MB RAM, out of the 256MB of Rom you have around 140mb of free space to play with, but you will need to rely on a microSD card for additional space. For system memory you are left with around 20Mb free, which leads onto....

Performance

Even though the Glofiish has Samsung SC3 2442 500 MHz Processor we felt that its performance suffered slightly at times, by this we meant that programs took a while to open and suspect that the hi-graphical detail or low system memory could play apart, but we have read that a ROM update could resolve the performance problems.

Overall though we had no problems playing back videos or when navigating with the in-built GPS receiver.

GPS

As mentioned the E-Ten comes with a SiRF-Start III receiver and several GPS utilities to go with it.

One of the programs is a QuickGPS fix utility that you would have heard about before, essentially this is used to fetch satellite data via GPRS - to speed up the acquisition time.

The other utility is a program that allows you to send pre-set SMS messages with your GPS coordinates, which could prove useful if your mates have a GPS receiver and can enter co-ordinates as a destination.

Indoors the receiver definitely needs the help of its data companion to pick up our location (we clocked it at around a couple of minutes).

But outside there were no problems acquiring and maintaining our position whilst driving - we used a small program called Nav4All for our tests which uses GPRS data, but you can utilise 3rd party software such as TomTom Navigator 6 for example.

Because of its hi-res screen it did pick up reflections to a certain degree, but it’s not that bad and cleverly E-Ten have recessed the screen into the case slightly to help.

Plus as the X800 is relatively small pedestrian navigation is also useful.

Battery

The battery life from the 1530 mAh battery is claimed to last between 2.5 to 5hours for GPS usage, which we recks is on par with similar dedicated GPS units. Talk time 5-7 hours, Standby 120-150 hours and Pocket PC usage 10-15 hours.

Of course when using 3G or Wi-Fi expect the claimed battery life to drain faster than normal.