HTC TyTN II – Vodafone V1615 – MDA Vario III – Features and Review

Well the HTC HTC TyTN II has finally landed on our shores and is available to buy from several online stores. Hopefully within the next few months Vodafone will release their branded version of it, the V1615 and also T Mobile as the MDA Vario III. Cnet have recently done a review of it, and we have a summary of the general thoughts of this phone.

1. The phone has built in GPS, and picks up the satellite relatively quickly.
2. Slightly different key layout than the TyTN, Mda Vario II etc
3. It is slightly smaller than the TyTn however it is heavier than its predecessor, 190g compared to 176g. The dimensions are 112 mm (L) X 59 mm (W) X 19 mm (T) compared to the TyTn at 112.5 mm (L) X 58 mm (W) X 21.95 mm (T)
4. The large colour touch screen now tilts up allowing it to be used as a mini laptop (though I cannot see why anyone would use it like that, the old TyTn has far too smaller keyboard to use in a laptop style.
5. The Sim card slot is not situated behind the screen for easy access, which is handy if you have 2 sims, 1 for work 1 for personal use
6. The slide-out keypad is one of the best Qwerty keypads Cnet has used. Which I would expect as the TyTn had an excellent keypad ( though the keypad on the phone I use now seems to be playing up grrr)
7. The three way scroll wheel remains from the original TyTn, again I would of expected this as it was a big hit with the TyTn.
8. The camera has had the pixels increased from 2 to 3 Maga pixels. Unfortunately there is not a proper flash as with the original. The camera does perform well in light areas though.
9. TyTN II runs Windows Mobile 6 and has 128MB of ram, meaning that everything will run faster, and WM6 appears less buggy than WM5 in my opinion.
10. Windows Mobile 6 comes preinstalled with a variety of applications that let you view and edit Microsoft Office documents, chat to friends on Messenger, listen to music and receive emails instantly over push email, among other things.
11. As with the original TyTn it has a vast array of connections (something the iPhone could learn from) including HSDPA (3.5G allowing broadband speeds over your phone), GSM/GPRS/EDGE: Quad Band.
12. The battery lasted around 2 days if the feature (GPS/WiFi) were not used heavily.

Overall the conclusion was this is a fantastic phone and only the N95 can match it in terms of connectivity and functionality. Our opinion is that this is obviously a phone aimed at the business market but with consumer appeal, and therefore it does not have the looks of things like the iPhone, however if you value functionality over form this is possibly the phone for you.The only thing that could possibly let this phone down is WM6, I have had my MDA Vario II (TyTn) for over a year now, and WM5 was defiantly glitchy, with the phone frequently locking up and many other annoying idiosyncrasies. I have upgraded my TyTn (and voided the warranty) to WM6 and have found it much better, though I do still have the occasional problem with it, though this could be partly due to the fact I have dropped the phone dozens of times and generally not looked after it very well.The MDA Vario III is available from T-Mobile with CoPilotor the MDA Vario IV is now available