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On top of the handheld, there's a 3.5 mm audio jack, a CompactFlash Type II expansion slot, and the stylus silo which contains a surprisingly comfortable, retractable stylus. Moving on to the front, we'll first stop to glance at the placing of the speaker of the device and its microphone. These are placed respectively on top of the front and in the lower right corner - and the reason is that the Pocket LOOX will have its own GSM/GPRS modulem with which a Pocket PC Phone Edition upgrade comes bundled, to convert the device into a fully fledged connected handheld.
 | The LOOX supports a large number of Bluetooth profiles via Pocket Plugfree
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Listing the remaining functions on the front of the device is quickly dealt with; there's a power on/off button in the upper right corner, to which an ambient light sensor and the alarm LED of the device is placed. The latter indicates alarms that have gone off, and what state the battery of the LOOX is in when charging. On the lower part of the device, there's a four-way navipad with an action function - very comfortable despite its small size, I might add - and hardware shortcut buttons to the Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Today applications. Another indication that the LOOX is prepared from the start for its GSM/GPRS add-on module is the green and red circles surrounding the Calendar and Tasks button; I'll leave it to you to guess what these do.
Finally, there's the very nice 16-bit transflective TFT display of the device. Its brightness can be automatically controlled by means of the ambient light sensor previously mentioned, and can also be manually adjusted. The levels are within good parameters, and the screen itself is very pleasant to look at - and ClearType renders beautifully with virtually no visible color tinting.
In terms of software, the LOOX comes well equipped. It's got the full roster of Pocket PC applications, and in addition comes with several excellent bundled applications on the CD of which Pocket Informant (PIM replacement), Nyditot Virtual Display 3.0 (allows for larger virtual resolutions and rotating the display), KSE TrueFax 2.01b (lets users send and receive faxes), F-Secure FileCrypto (creates special encrypted folders that integrate seamlessly with the OS), and finally the Westtek Clearvue suite which is capable of viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents in their full glory on the Pocket PC without any conversion loss.
In addition to the bundled applications, the LOOX also has a couple of pre-installed ones: LX Backup, SpeedMenu and Rappore Pocket PlugFree. LX Backup is the kind of standard backup application that you expect to find on most Pocket PCs today, and backs up a RAM image of the LOOX to either an SD, MMC or CF memory card. The SpeedMenu is Fujitsu Siemens' version of a combined start menu and task manager; it allows users to add shortcuts to all kinds of files, and uses a hierarchical setup just like the Pocket PC's own start menu. If you frequently access a given set of documents, the SpeedMenu could come in very handy - if not, it adds so little you can just as well remap its hardware button to perform a more useful task.
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