The S-Xgen is going to be launched at CES in just a few days. They are entering a tough market and although they mention UMPCs in their marketing, its the communicator phone segment that’s going to be the battleground for them. I’ve got a few opinions about devices in that business-user market.
If you had to choose between these two would you choose the S-XGen or the HTC Athena?
I know what I’d choose. its all in the screen size for me. The bigger browsing space wins every time because I’ll be accessing most of my applications through it.
On the left you have 4″ 470 x 280 on the right 5″ 640×480. Its literally a huge difference. Over twice the number of screen pixels.
They both run Windows Mobile and have hard drives (20 vs 
they both have keyboards and integrated 3G.
There’s only the price to consider and guess what, when I walk into a Vodafone shop and see the Athena at 350 Euro on a 2 year contract, I’m probably going to make the final decision there and then.
The S-Xgen will probably only be available in the US too. I can’t imagine them going through RoHS and CE certifications, translations and setting up multi-lingual sales and support processes. The market isn’t big enough for that. HTC already have it in place.
The other non-windows options are the Nokia E90 (rumor) or the ROAD. These two are in the same segment at the $1200+ mark. The ROAD ‘Handy PC’ is a German product and may not cross over into the US market.
This sector of the phone market is going to become more important as sensible data contracts start to kick in and browser access becomes more critical for end users. My feeling is that anything under 640 pixels wide in this category doesn’t really stand a chance.
