There are lots of reviews around on the HTC shift – the first video review I found was by a hilariously jubulant guy called Hugo Ortega and you can see it here if you want … My review here is not going to cover the standard spec and features as you can get that kind of information in any number of places.
Instead, having used one of these HTC Shift things for a few weeks now, I thought I’d try and make a note of things that I have found out about it (good and bad) that haven’t generally appeared in other reviews.
You may well know that the HTC Shift has two chips – a windows mobile (like a big PDA) and a PC processor for full blown vista. The battery is great on one and lousy on the other – you guess which 
Because of this, after one week, I purchased another battery and a spare mains charger – just one of those things you need to get used to if you want to use vista on this a lot. This cost an extra £45 is total but if you’re spending over £800 on this puppy then that might not be too great an issue.
On the subject of hardware, generally, it works just fine. Once you’re used to exactly how to slide out and/or tilt the keyboard, its very easy – and the mouse trackpad which looks insanely small and useless is actually very functional and surprisingly sensitive to fast / slow movements of the mouse across the screen. Having the mouse keys on the other side of the screen isn’t intuitive for me – but its okay. And the good old “delay = right click” is very useful when pointing on the touch screen.
The other piece of hardware that I though would be quite useless was the fingerprint recognition device for secure entry. But it actually works great, allowing me to password protect my account on vista and get in with a simple swipe. There is software to also allow you (via a slightly annoying prompt if you’re not interested) to encrypt any web based username and password request. I ignored it for a while, due to lack of trust, lol – but gave in and now love it. Still not sure if its safer than “remember me on this computer” though. And I’m worried I’m going to forget all my passwords!
The camera? Well, I can’t tell you anything as there doesn’t seem to be any pre-installed software to use it on either vista or winmobile – which is a boo-boo if you ask me.
The keyboard is good – really good. But its not as big as a full size, so you touch typers like me will find it difficult to touch type – and its not quite small enough (with my hands anyway) to comfortably hold and use both thumbs to reach all the keys. For longer typing sessions, I suppose you could always get a fold-out bluetooth one. Oh, and some of the blue function key equivalents don’t work in winmobile but that’s not too much bother as the important ones (eg sound and brightness) do.
The only thing I’m really not that impressed with about the hardware is the battery cover. It can be prone to come open when you are sliding the screen/keyboard into position which I find annoying.
Crash protection?! I’ve never dropped my shift – but when I place it on my pillow even a little vigorously, it tends to disengage the disk (or whatever) to enter its “I’ve been dropped mode” and instantly powers off. This in my view is a good feature but a little sensitive for my liking.
And finally on the hardware(ish) front is the case – its a lovely leather jobby, but I found that the fit is so snug that you have to store the device upside down as it were, otherwise you’ll inadvertently end up turning on the side slider power switch when you put it away.
Software? Well, lets do windows mobile first, then vista. The thing you notice straight away is that you have a cut-down version of the latest windows mobile software – akin to something called Snapvue. You may like to go here and rectify that immediately! NB, if you get trouble attaching the .LNK file from within a windows email package to your winmobile account, make sure the file is on your desktop, then right click it and choose send to -> mail recipient. You won’t be able to get at it from your full outlook client, but you winmobile won’t care and will let you open it. Thanks to the wonderful Gareth Evans in our IT Helpdesk for that little tip.
The choice to do the snapvu thing was frankly just bonkers on HTC’s part and really restricts many simple tasks like even correcting the time! If it weren’t for the saving grace of the liberate possibility, I’d have sent the whole device back.
Anyway, as far as windows mobile is concerned, no real surprises (though I do like HTC’s weather feature) – and, due to the screen size the whole interface is HUGE and really easy to navigate with a fat finger. You can’t as far as I can tell, use the mouse or configure the mouse buttons to launch applications or the like. Neither can you use the bluetooth chip or the wifi facility or (afaik) the camera in mobile. Oh, and that goes for voice phone functionality also. All a great shame really.
I’m not sure why HTC took away the ability to connect with your vista chip as once you’ve restored it via the liberate process above, it becomes a very useful feature.
Before “liberating” your shift as outlined from the link above, setting up comms was really easy – just popped my Vodafone sim in the slot, fed the software the name of my exchange server together with password details, and the sync just happened. Really really good.
Operation under windows? Well, vista is a little annoying buy hey ho, not HTC’s fault. I wonder whether XP would be better … Anyway, its GREAT and its taken every application I’ve thrown at it – but so long as you only really want to run one application at a time. Any more and you may begin to feel the difference between this and your high spec desk/lap top.
As one who never reads manuals, it took me an hour or so to figure that the only way you are going to get surfing via your mobile data sim is if you first turn off wifi. Once done, there’s again absolutely no configuration to do and it just works – and very well too.
There is a really handy application attached to one of the external buttons that lets you adjust sound, brightness and turn on/off wifi / data card / bluetooth etc. The other button that changes resolution actually works great too (though it worked better before I downloaded some Microsoft recommended updates – grrrr).
The screen brightness will continually reset itself to a dimmer setting than max even if you switch off auto in the application referred to above. The only way to get around this is to change the power setting to high performance.
It also comes with another MS application called Origami Experience 2 – which is some way of bringing web feeds for weather and application launch icons together or something. I dunno, I just took it out of the start menu straight away as it annoyed me, sorry.
On the subject of start – I always use the slider switch to put my vista into sleep as opposed to shutting down. Otherwise, you may find yourself planning several days ahead if you need to use vista due to the bootup times. Again, not entirely HTC’s fault.
Annoyingly, I took some patches from Microsoft and I now have mouse pointer issues and a couple of other annoyances – but that’s not HTC’s fault.
I’ve found it very easy to install additional software by connecting via wifi to a DVD drive on a local PC – not sure a novice would know what to do though and there isn’t much in the way of guidance (or do I need to read the manual?).
Conclusion? Great piece of kit and I believe that it increases my productivity beyond the cost of the device to my organisation – which I suppose is the only thing that counts in one sense. I’d give it an 8/10 – recognising that some simple things addressed as outlined above would easily take that to a 9+. Would I buy this with my own money if I hadn’t been able to get one through work? Yes (probably)
NB I had better explain that my situation is a little unusual in that I can’t really use a laptop because I need to be very close to any screen I’m using and laptop keyboards are either too big or the whole thing is just too heavy to make this comfortably feasible. I was also a heavy PDA user.
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