A touch-screen smartphone with Wi-Fi, and FM radio and GPS navigation. Is this phone worth the hefty price, or should you pass it by?
Review summary of the Pharos GPS Phone 600:
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 The Pharos GPS Phone 600 is an advanced, expensive, touch-screen phone running a pared down version of a popular OS. iPhone comparisons may be premature, but considering the phone suffers from some user interface issues that could have been helped by a keyboard, this device may serve as a caveat to touch-screen phone makers about the pitfalls of keyless hardware. It benefits from all the saving graces of Windows Mobile, but can't take advantage of all that the Pocket PC Edition has to offer, especially in terms of messaging and office applications, due to its lack of keyboard. The phone's on-board GPS radio is among the sharpest we've used, but a confusing interface left us stranded on major highways. Overall, the device has more potential than phones with a GPS tracker slapped in haphazardly, and may be less expensive than purchasing a smartphone and a GPS device separately, but still falls short of expectations thanks to problems with usability. Release: February 2007. Price: $700.
Pros: Best GPS tracking we've seen on a phone. Loads of features, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM radio.
Cons: GPS interface is difficult to use, requires a learning curve. Lack of keyboard hurts productivity and messaging applications.
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Full Pharos GPS Phone 600 Review:
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Editor's note: Since our original posting, Pharos has decided include with the GPS Phone 600 a 2GB microSD card pre-loaded with the maps of North America.
Design:
The Pharos GPS Phone 600 is a relatively slim block of brushed metal with a large touch-screen face. Physically, it looks similar to the Cingular 8525, though without the slide-out keyboard it manages to be about a quarter-inch thinner. The design suffers from a few miscues that will stymie users familiar with the Pocket PC variety of Windows Mobile, or smartphones in general. First of all, the stylus slots into the bottom of the phone, which is neither here nor there except that the stylus is completely blocked when the Pharos is holstered into its car charger. At the top of the phone are buttons marked with a satellite for GPS, and a poorly placed "Home" button that actually functions as the Windows Mobile "OK" button. At the bottom are two soft keys between the "send" and "end" keys, though because the soft keys are placed too close to the middle of the screen, they rarely line up with the menu function to which they correspond.
Calling - Very good
The Pharos GPS Phone 600 comes unlocked, so we popped in our Cingular SIM for GSM coverage. Generally, reception was very good, up to four bars in lower Manhattan and Northern Jersey. Call quality was average, with a slight tunnel effect in some areas while we traveled, but calls sounded clean for the most part. The phone features a bevy of calling options, including Bluetooth, a fairly loud speakerphone and speaker-independent voice dialing. The robust address book is buoyed by the venerable Microsoft Outlook, which allows for ActiveSync syncing with your desktop and live, while-you-type searching. Conference calling functions similarly to other Windows Mobile PPC phones, which is to say it requires more menu drilling than we'd like, but otherwise works fine. Without Wi-Fi, GPS, or Bluetooth turned on, we got about four and a half hours of talk time, which is pretty good, only a half hour shy of what Pharos promises.
Our favorites: Lots of calling features, like speaker-independent dialing and tight Outlook integration.
Our request: One-touch dialing is difficult without a hardware keypad.
Messaging - Good
There is no denying that Microsoft Outlook is a top-notch e-mail client for mobile phones, especially with its tight address book integration and easy synchronization with your PC (provided you're using Outlook, of course). Reading e-mails on the GPS Phone was a pleasant experience, especially with the phone's large, three-inch display. Typing e-mails, however, was nearly impossible. Forget using your fingers; unless you're Edward Stylus-hands, you won't be able to type on the on-screen keyboard. Even with the stylus, typing was a tedious exercise. We can't simply blame Microsoft's pop-up keyboard; though the screen is large by smartphone standards, any software keyboard on a smartphone screen will seem small compared to a hardware counterpart (let this be a warning shot across Apple's bow). The phone lacks any instant messaging client other than MSN, which is par for the course for Windows Mobile PPC phones. SMS was capable on the phone, with plenty of screen real estate for full messages coming and going, but lacked the threaded SMS messaging Palm has recently added to its Windows Mobile-powered Treo 750.
Our favorites: Outlook is a desktop class e-mail client on your cell phone
Our request: A hardware keyboard, if the phone wants to be taken seriously for messaging
GPS Navigation - Good
The centerpiece of this phone is its GPS capabilities. At $600, we assumed the phone would have the sensitivity and power of a stand-alone GPS device, and in many ways we were correct. Maps are loaded onto a microSD card, as opposed to services like VZ Navigator, in which maps are continually downloaded over the V Cast network. With capacities up to 2GB, microSD cards are certainly up to the task, but if you forget to load your card, you're stuck without a map. On a trip from New Jersey into New York City, without a Northern Jersey map loaded, the phone recognized major highways, but when we were not close to an interstate, the system seemed to get stuck looking for our location, and required a hard restart of the device -- a daunting task while dodging traffic in the I-78 express lane at 65 miles per hour. Pharos does offer over-the-air downloads for maps through its subscription-based Smart Navigator service, which also gives you real-time traffic reports, so you won't be completely out of luck. Smart Navigator will be free for a three-month trial period, but then users will be charged $7 per month, up to $66 for a full year of service.
Response time was much better on the phone than we've seen on other GPS-enabled handsets. The map was able to track our movements in real time; we could see our little arrow turn as our car turned, and when we stopped, the GPS system registered this, whereas most phones take a few moments to update. Turn-by-turn directions were much more responsive, and we never found ourselves missing turns because the phone hadn't updated, a problem we encountered on both TeleNav and VZ Navigator-equipped handsets.
The GPS menus themselves are modeled after those you might find on a car or stand-alone GPS device, using touch-screen menus and even a full-screen keyboard that grays-out letters to help you choose street names. Overall, however, we found navigating the software to be confusing. Often, selecting menu options required a lot of digging, or tapping upon general, unmarked locations on the map; for example, you must tap in the top quarter of the screen to switch between 2-D and 3-D views, which isn't exactly intuitive. Also, no matter how often we selected New York as our map of choice, the program seemed to prefer trying to find us in Los Angeles. Buttons on the map screen read "Go" and "GPS," without any real indication of what you'll find when you press them. Tapping the screen zooms out, which seems counterintuitive. Tap-dragging creates a zoom box, while dragging the map requires you to tap, hold, and drag. We like the zoom box idea, but the tap-hold may require too much dexterity for on-the-go users. The five-way button moves your cursor around the screen, but the movements are so jumpy that we had a hard time figuring out what location we were looking at after the cursor leapt.
Back on the plus side, we did appreciate the Point of Interest database, which included not only our favorite topics, such as hospitals and ATM machines, but also historical points of interest, plus one that we especially enjoyed: mountain peaks, which pointed out local summits in our state.
Our favorites: Best tracking we've seen on a GPS phone, the phone knew where we were at all times
Our request: A more user-friendly map interface with clear, on-screen buttons, and smooth panning and zooming.
Odds and Ends
Pharos bundled HandiTV -- a streaming video service with short-clip content available from networks such as ABC News, CNN and ESPN, as well as some local network affiliates -- with our pre-production review unit. Streaming was generally poor over the EDGE network; the video paused to rebuffer every few seconds. The phone also includes Wi-Fi, and while we connected to open wireless networks with ease, we had trouble connecting to our WPA-secured office network. The built-in FM radio tuner picks up a good signal, but comes saddled with a clunky interface and lacks an auto-program feature. The phone also features standard Windows Mobile PPC accoutrements Windows Media Player and Mobile Office, though without a keyboard the Mobile Office apps are more useful as readers than full-fledged editing programs.
Related phones: GPS-enabled smartphones
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