Thanks guys! Sorry for replying late, i was busy personalizing my new phone
I got myself a HTC P3400i finally. After 3 days of use, i can just say one thing about it: AWESOME! At this price i dont think there is anything better than this available in the market. Windows Mobile 6 is such a great OS for mobiles, i have become its fan! I installed SQL Server CE 3.5 on it, and with it i even got the query analyzer and database management tools too!
Isn't it amazing! And now with .NET 3.5 and 2.0 compact frameworks installed, i am free to develop whatever i wish for my device using my same .NET skillset that i use for PC apps, and thats what i call true personalization capabilities for a developer. I mean, using themes, ringtones and what not is ok, but its for casual user. For a developer like me, the real feast is the .NET 3.5 CF availability along with SQL Server, WOW! And i also liked the connectivity with Exchange Server which is very useful in office scenerios. I personally tried it with my PC with 2 such mobiles and it works perfectly.
Along with that i installed TotalCommander (A powerful File manager replacement), PHM Powertools(A system utility pack), PHM Regedit and PHM Regsvrppc (for registry editing as well as registering/unregistering COM servers) PPCPIMBackup(Backup Restore Tools for most of the mobile data), Clear Temp(Junk Cleaner), Opera 9.65, Pocket CM Image Viewer (Image Viewer with TouchFlow support
), TCPMP (Its like VLC Player for mobile) PPTsk (A Task Manager Replacement), CommandPrompt for Windows Mobile and Flash for Windows Mobile Plugin v7. I also configured a few cache related registry settings which boosted my startup and normal filesystem usage speed by 10% and 5% respectively.
After all this, this device has become a perfect companion for me. The only sore point that i find in it is absense of 3G data services (which is not much of an issue right now) and 64 MB RAM (Device is a little bit sluggish because of that). Although i have read at many places that upgrading to Windows Mobile 6.1 will speed it up a bit, but since HTC has not released any official updates for it, i am not gonna install any custom ROM image available on forums as i have yet to see one which did not gave any problem. I better stay away from that, and this could also void my warranty, although i am not sure.
Messaging Application of this device is one of the greatest i have every seen and it can configure most of the E-Mail services automatically. I use Yahoo, hotmail, live and gmail accounts and these worked perfectly. One of the coolest feature is that it can download mails even from the free yahoo accounts for which yahoo does not provides pop3 access, i wonder how? It doesn't do it like YahooPops! does it on WIndows as that takes ages to load, but this application works very fast with all e-mail accounts. Thats really a great thing.
As for multimedia, It supports all major formats and the mono external speaker is just enough for listening to your calls in a moderately crowded place. If anybody heard the sound of a nokia 6233 (with a ringtone altered with MP3Gain at 102 DB) then you can think of it as if one of the speakers of this phone is taken out.Its quiet loud, but definitely not very good for crowded places. Headphones give quiet high quality music, i love it. Windows Media Player works great for most of the time and the audio booster app given by HTC is very good. there is even an MP3 cutter feature where you can cut your ringtones from full songs on the device itself! SLEEK!
Video playback at anything greater than VCD resolution stutter and sometimes HUGE frame-droppings can be seen. This issue is less prevalent on the TCPMP player.
Camera is avaerage, gives nice shot at day time and outdoor shots work out OK. Inside my home at day time, its white balance becomes a bit trickier to manage. Night shots with Night Mode ON come out a bit grainy with a high blue tinge.
Network transfers on EDGE networks (Idea in my case) are awesome, i get 16-24Kbps speeds at night and 12-22Kbps at daytime with Full,Full-1 signals.
Today application by HTC is a very awesome plugin, like on all HTC devices. I love it of the functionality and quick access to features it provides. Specially, the favourite contacts and Apps screens are very useful. But it takes quiet a lot of space on home screen and leaves very little space to enjoy any wallpapers, if you like them. IT could have been made a bit smaller.
Overall, i would just say this: If you love to or out of curiosity want to have a Windows Mobile PDA and are on a tight budget of <=10K, look no further, GO GET IT!
OOPS! I wrote a review. Sorry guys for this long post, but i was being filled up with these things and had to say these somewhere, so....
OOPS
