Reviewing the Athena X7500 rumour.

I saw it high on Tailrank at one point yesterday which means a lot of people must have been talking about it and now i’ve had time to dry my trousers I can sit down and analyse what we’ve actually got here.

There seems to be two sets of specifications floating about. One with a 3.5″ screen and a 320×240 resolution and the other with a 5″ screen and 640×480 resolution. I think we can see from the images that its not a 3.5″. I’m going with the VGA specs. This Athena is bigger than a PDA and needs 640×480 otherwise the text is going to look terrible.  

Its not a UMPC. There’s no real getting away from that fact. As I’ve said before, if it’s not 800 wide, its not a UMPC. To me the ultra mobile PC starts with rich browsing and you just don’t get that on anything less that on 800 pixels wide. It smaller and lighter than nearly all UMPCs too. This is something that looks like 400grams. Not 1000.

Is it a smartphone though? Well, to be honest, I think it’s to big to be a phone. A mobile phone needs to be with you all the time. This is something that you can’t take with you all the time. This is more like one of those personal filofax’s. I had one of those and I never put it in a pocket. In fact, I always forgot to take it with me.

Its a damn interesting device, its one that I want its one that I think satifies most of my original Carrypad requirements. Because of that I’m going to go through it in a little detail. Feel free to switch off at any moment readers because this could get a little detailed. Theres a summary of the stats on the datasheet that I’ve just created for the Athena.

Starting with The screen. 5″ diagonal. A nice size but its a 4:3 format, 640×480 job. 640×480 is certainly a lot of screen space. You’ll be able to do some office work on pocket Excel and pocket Word. I’ve used these apps on 320×240 so something that’s 4 times the size is going to be really nice. In fact, you’ll get someting like 5 times the working space becuase the extra space is all used for working area. Not menus. For videos its going to be OK. Not perfect though. Widescreen format is common now so you’ll have to crop DVD’s to fit the screen or suffer with black bars top and bottom. Not ideal but there’s plently of 4:3 content still out there and your own time-shifted TV content should look very nice on it. What it will be good for though is navigation. The screen is about the perfect size and resolution for that. Its also perfect for emails. No doubt about that. But what about browsing. Well. Its not going to be that good. With Opera installed things will be OK and if you dont mind a little left-right scrolling, I think it could be bareable. Finally, the touchscreen experience will be pretty good. Becuase its going to be so light, you’ll easily be able to hold it in one hand and write memos. DOn’t expect the Tablet PC experience but I think its going to be muh more useful than a 320×240 touchscreen.

Screen Summary:

• Video: 8/10
• Office: 6/10
• Music: 10/10
• Email: 10/10
• Browsing: 6/10
• Navigation: 10/10

Lets move on to the keyboard. There’s two things to consider. The size/feel of it and the positioning of it. Because we can’t actually touch this device theres no telling what its going to be like but at that size you won’t be getting anything over 40% of your normal typing speed on a table. The positioning is bad. Just like the Samsung SPH-P9000 it looks like it needs a flat surface. This is a problem. Actually quite a major problem. I’ve learnt that thumbing while standing up is pretty useful. 95% of teens probably do 90% of their writing standing up too. It fits into spare moments on the bus, in a traffic jam and around the house quite nicely so if you need a table with the Athena then you’ve lost a lot of mobility. From the pictures, I cant see any way that you could have the keyboard flat against the back. Theres a bevel and a raised edge on the keybaord that would prevent that.

Keyboard: 5/10. It needs to be able to slide on to the back to make it really useful. However, the fact that it has one at all is a plus-point.

Processor. Both the Xscale and Samsung processors that have been talked about are high end. Clock-for-clock the Samsungs are more powerful. It really depends on wether a GPU is included to speed up 2D (and 3D gaming!) performance. I think i’d be quite happy with a 624Mhz processor. Multitasking isn’t going to be spot on (Ewan at SMS Text News talks about a way to really upset WM5 users for example.) but for things like skype and video playback, its going to be fine.

Layout. It looks like there’s dual cameras and a LED flashlight. The main camera is rumored to have 3MP. As long as its got good optics it could make a good happy snapper but its not going to beat the N93. You can see that by just looking at the apperture size. On the front we see the two portait mode WM5 buttons and something that looks like a mouse pointer. I doubt it is though. Note there are no speaker grills but its rumored to have stereo speakers. Its a shame you can’t see any details of the ports either but its supposed to have a VGA out (would that support a bigger resolution perhaps. If so, it could be an interesting option for presentations.) and a MiniSD slot. I haven’t seen any mention of USB but it has to be in there somewhere. As do the Mic/Line-Out sockets.

Radios + GPS. Apart from the GPS unit, you can pretty much forget the radios at this stage. It will totally depend on the region and provider. Lets assume that its being tested with a number of radios and keep fingers crossed that it supports the highest data rates available today. The GPS receiver is nice. There are some great navigation packages for WM5 and things will really improve. This could make the perfect touring device.

Storage. One report said 8GB. I think this is correct. I don’t know if its HDD or flash though. I really hope its flash but there’s a mention of G-sensor somewhere. Thats the fall-detection mechanism for hard drives. This could hit battery life quite hard.

Battery life. The rumor is: 2200mah battery. That doesn’t really tell us anything. If we assume standard voltages though, its a lot bigger than your average PDA battery. If you lock out the HDD and turn the radios off, it will probably last 9 or 10 hours but thats not exactly a real-life scenario is it. I guess (yes, guess) that its going to hit 4-5 hours useage over a 24hour ‘on’ period.

Price. This is not going to be cheap. More expensive than the existing HTC Universal so lets say 900-1000 Euro. $1000 perhaps. On a 24 month contract that brings it down to something like 30% of that.

Availability. I heard that its real. On the roadmap and ready for showing in Jan. Its hardly a consumer device so maybe we won’t see it it CES but I think we’ll see a lot more about the Athena in the new year.

I guess there’s more to talk about but this post is gettting redicuously long. Embarrasing even. How can anyone write so much about a silly little rumour! I guess no-one read this far except perhaps my always reliable listener Mr Google. This post is dedicated to him!

For the rest of you, I’ll drop a summary in the datasheet because I’ve decided to put it in the ultra mobile PC database. It deserves the place that has just been vacated by the Sharp SL-C1000! (I kicked it out!)

Update: Mobile-review.com report that its 350gm, has TV-out and VGA-out and uses the ATi 2282 Graphic Chip. I’ll update the datasheet.

Steve