14 DAY TRIAL // Oh yeah! HTC Artemis is coming to Europe and stops at the doors of the German carrier T-Mobile. They let it in and decided to launch it under the name of MDA Compact III, but they also made the quite mind blowing decision to remove its WLAN capabilities, crippling the hell out of it. This way, the T-Mobile customers will be able to get their hands on a handicapped Pocket PC that doesn't have 3G (UMTS or HSPDA flavor) and, the worst, not even Wi-Fi. Not a very good move from their part, but who knows what crossed their mind when doing it? They must have some secret plan that we don't know about up their sleeve that will convince the T-Mobile users to buy it anyway.
Fortunately, even if it has been crippled, the handset still has a lot to offer, being a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE device that works on 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz networks, having a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition running on a TI OMAP 850 processor that goes around the clock at a frequency of 201 MHz, and also offering a generous 2.8 inch 65k colors TFT touchscreen display with a resolution of 240x320 pixels.
The small-sized MDA Compact III measuring only 108x58x17 and weighing 160 grams also features a 2 megapixel CMOS camera with video recording capabilities, a full QWERTY keyboard, USB and wireless Bluetooth connectivity, the RollR HTC control system concept that includes a trackball and a trackwheel at the same time, a SiRF III GPS receiver so you can enjoy all the things the GPS technology comes with, a microSD memory expansion card slot and an FM radio with TMC support for navigation purposes.
Even if the MDA Compact III is a GPS enabled device, T-Mobile has also made another wrong move by deciding not to offer an integrated navigation solution, offering instead navigation through its NaviGate off-board navigation solution that will cost the user 99 Euro-cents for every route calculation it will make, a price that includes the GPRS/EDGE traffic costs. Is it me or they had it all wrong with this device?
The MDA Compact III will be released in the first half of November and will cost you 189.95 Euros if you sign a service agreement that includes the 24 months Relax 100 tariff.