REVIEW: NDrive S300

Introduction In the old days, the Windows Mobile hardware platform was manufactured by a select few big name players who usually specialised in business computer hardware. One by one blue chips firms like Compaq, Dell and Fujitsu have fallen by the wayside and our “Smartphones” are now supplied by up and coming tech companies like HTC and ASUS. Over the past year or so we’ve seen smaller lesser known companies come from nowhere and deliver some pretty good hardware at some very competitive prices. Portuguese company NDrive have taken this value market by the scruff of the neck and aggressively launched the S300, a Windows Mobile 6 device with included GPS system for a little over £200. Surely this is too good to be true isn’t it? Read on to find out………

For your delectation some photographs are thumbnails which may be clicked on to load a larger image.
Thanks go out to the Mike O’Shea at Tracktech for providing us with a review sample.
For more information on the NDrive S300 go to the NDrive website

Technical Specifications

Main Software Features Latest and most complete maps on Memory Card Very simple interface: touch-screen operation, developed for the inexperienced user Navigation to any address or point of interest: in any country or region with clear and accurate turn-by-turn voice instructions Fast, complete and easy to search contents: powerful database at your fingertip Dynamic data support: real-time weather reports and forecasts, open pharmacies and cultural events (require country local provider) Phone support: directly call a Point of Interest, access dynamic navigation information on the go (requires GSM) Multimedia: play audio, video and view photos (on selected devices) Multilanguage support: written on screen and voice commands Advanced features: Send and receive locations by SMS Optional alarm when exceeding pre-defined speed limit Steady speed cameras support

Favourite’s sharing Technical Details Platform Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional with Direct Push Mail GSM/GPRS/PDA and GPS Physical details 121.39 mm x 62.9 mm x 16 mm 148 g Features CPU 416 MHz 128 MB ROM + 64 MB RAM SDHC MicroSD card (I/0) 2 mega-pixel camera with Macro 1500 mAh battery Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP Reflective QVGA TFT display (320x240 pixels) with 65000 Colors - Touch Sensitive PDA Outlook Mobile Word Mobile Excel Mobile PowerPoint Mobile MSN Messenger (Chat) Pocket Windows Media Player GSM/GPRS/Wireless GSM/GPRS - Quad-band GPRS class 10 and Wireless Modem GPS Sirf III WiFi / WLAN : IEEE 802.11b/g (max. 11Mbps) Pocket Internet Explorer (HTML, WML, XML, WAP 2.0) MMS Ringtones (MIDI), Audio digital (Wav), MP3 Battery 200 h in standby Li-ion 1500 mAh rechargeable battery

Externals and Hardware

In the box The full retail package I received for review contains: NDrive S300 Wired headset 1500mAh battery USB mini male to USB male cable Cigarette charger MicroSD card and adapter Quick start guide User manual Hardware manual NDrive software DVD Getting started CD containing: Microsoft Active Sync Microsoft Windows Mobile Device Centre Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Trial It's interesting to see Windows Mobile Device Centre finally bundled with a device, but I am a little disappointed that NDrive hasn’t included a few software items with the device. Something like the SpB suite, or at least Mobile Shell would have been nice. It is after all a multifunction device and not a standalone GPS unit

Convergence Modern life in the 21st Century is becoming ever more complex and hectic, and PDAs that are being developed have to evolve to suit that need. No longer are users happy to carry around a PDA, phone, etc; more functionality is demanded from the market and in ever more pocketable and slight devices. The NDrive S300 strives to meet these needs boasting a truly spectacular specification and therefore contains the following areas of functionality within the device: Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) Mobile (cell) Phone Camera GPS Navigation Unit Push Email Portable media player As we proceed through the review you should able to decide for yourself whether the S300 ticks all the boxes.

Aesthetics With the latest HTC devices, the upcoming Sony Ericsson offerings, and in particular the I-phone, the world of Windows Mobile devices has been turned on its head. In the past manufacturers were hell bent on pushing the specifications one step further with each mobile generation. It's interesting that many of this year's new releases will be focusing more on svelte lines, flush screens and fancy finger waving interfaces rather than faster CPUs and more RAM. Unfortunately the S300 has not benefitted from these recent aesthetic influences and upon first glance looks a little dated. It’s not an ugly device though, far from it. I like the gun metal colour and the frontal controls are nicely shaped underneath the screen around the circular Dpad and trackball. The edges of the device are generally nicely rounded and the black frame around the screen works well in contrast to the metallic grey. Even the NDrive logo is not too bad, sitting above the screen, although I’d personally have put it on the rear of the device.

Front The front view of the S300 is fairly run of the mill as far as Windows Mobile 6 devices are concerned. All controls are present and accounted for and most things are exactly where you'd expect. The two send and receive buttons are large and easily accessible towards the bottom of the device. Sitting in between them is the circular shaped Dpad and trackball. The area immediately around the Dpad is also not unusual as it contains the Windows and OK buttons slightly below the Dpad and above it are the two soft buttons. I had no issues with finding the send and receive buttons or the Dpad without looking. This is important for picking up calls efficiently. As far as buttons go, that’s your lot on the front of the device. There are no Mail and IE buttons etc. Also in the front of the device are the indicator LED and speaker.

Back The rear cover of the device is pretty sparsely populated bar the top 20% or so. The rest of the back is taken up by the overly large battery cover. There are two ports either side at the very top of the device and a panel with the speaker sat below. The panel also contains the 2 mega pixel dual focus camera, but I'll discuss that later.

Top & Bottom The top and bottom of the device are both unusually sparse. The bottom only contains the USB charge and sync connector and the and the top just the GPS button. The access for the stylus silo is on one of the rear bottom corners.

Right Both the left and right sides of the S300 contain a plethora of controls. The right hand side of the device contains, from top to bottom, the power button, MicroSD card slot and the camera button. I like having the MicroSD slot on the side rather than hidden under the battery. It’s a lot more accessible this way, and personally I’m not concerned about dirt etc, as I generally keep my device dirt free. The buttons present are of a decent size and travel. In short they do as they were designed.

Left The left hand side of the device is equally as well populated as the right. The reset button and the comm manager button sit underneath the combination of up and down volume buttons. Again as with the right side all the controls seem well controlled and good for purpose. The buttons are all well spaced on the device too. You should not be hitting the wrong button at any point.

Stylus The stylus silo for the S300 is situated diagonally opposite the power button on the bottom corner of the device. The silo is a three quarter length affair with a stylus that extends from three quarters to full length in the now usual telescopic fashion. I found the stylus to be a bit flimsy, but then I’m not much of a stylus user generally.

Headset The headset is a fairly nice looking affair, but is not out of the ordinary for this type of device. I quite like the headphones and found the mute button was not too big and bulky as often the HTC ones are. One nice feature is the right angled connector. This makes putting the device in your pocket with the headset on much more comfortable than with a straight connector.

Battery The S300 has a very big Lithium Ion battery. It's not quite as big as some of its competitors but it is large. It's not surprising then that it contains a pretty impressive 1500mAh of juice. When you look at the seemingly measly 1350mAh of the HTC Kaiser and the positively miserly 1320mAh of the Toshiba G900 it's easy to see why the S300 offers a good couple of days worth of use from a single charge, something neither of the other two devices are capable of. I've been quite impressed with the battery life on the S300. Any WM device that goes a couple of days without requiring a charger is out of the ordinary these days. I found I could nearly get 3 days worth of usage from the S300. An average day’s use for me consists of up to 20 minutes of calls, 30 minutes of browsing in a mediocre 3G area and about 100 push emails. I'm not much of a texter but there's usually a couple of SMS in there too. I also use my device as an MP3 player while I'm cycling to work, so there's also an extra 30 minutes of music too, over a set of Bluetooth headphones. For me the 2 day charge is a very important factor when choosing a device so this is very nice indeed. You do have to consider though that while there are very few "full spec" devices that offer 2/3 day use per charge but this device is not a “full spec” device as there is no UMTS. I’ve found 3G and HSDPA to be a major cause of battery drain so the fact that you get 2/3 days and there is no UMTS makes it less spectacular. It’s still good, but not as impressive as it first seems.

Sim Loading Installing your SIM card into the NDrive is a fairly standard affair. Flip off the back panel; pull out the battery and insert the card into the SIM holder. Pop the battery in place fit the rear cover and you're good to go. Obviously unlike the Tytn2 this means powering down the device to swap the sim cards, but I can’t see this being a problem.

Size As you can see from the comparison shots with the HTC Tytn II and the HTC Touch Diamond the NDrive S300 is not a small device. It’s considerably larger than the Diamond and taller than the Tytn II. The S300 is thinner than its keyboard wielding rival though but not nearly as slim as the Diamond.

Screen There’s not a lot of dressing up I can do with the screen on the S300. Like the overall appearance of the device, the screen itself is unspectacular and would seem equally at home on a HTC Wizard or Trinity from a couple of years back. It’s quite small considering the size of the device, is QVGA as opposed to VGA with the new devices and is not particularly bright and sharp. It’s not a bad screen, but like a lot else on the NDrive, it’s average.

GPS The GPS unit was tested using Copilot 7 and the built in NDrive software for Navigation, as well as VisualGPSce for general diagnostics, and no problems were encountered. Lock times were not as fast as most of the devices we see these days though and I found it more difficult to get a signal than on the HTC Diamond. As you can see from the image, the Diamond was able to get a lock indoors at the window, but the S300 was not. Due to the short time I had to spend with the device I didn't get chance to do a complete write up of the GPS navigation software. I'll give you my first impressions though and show you a few bits of eye candy. The GPS software bundled with the S300 is NDrive's own branded software. The software looks good and seemed to route reasonably well too (without Copilot's "interesting routing features"). The base package contains all the GPS features you'd expect these days like safety camera support, speed limit warnings, POI's, real time traffic and weather over GPRS etc. There are also some very nice extra features available like the 3D photo maps and POI's rendered in 3D on non photo maps.

Trackball Ok, I’ll get it out of the way right now. I hate trackballs. I hate them with a passion. If you like them, then I’m happy for you, but you might want to jump to the next section. I’ve never seen the point of a mouse pointer and a trackball on a touch screen device. You end up frantically spinning the ball and getting nowhere, or setting it too sensitive and missing everything you’re trying to click on. IT’S A TOUCH SCREEN. TOUCH IT!!!! The trackball itself doubles as an action button for the Dpad too, but it makes it harder to use as the ball rolls when you push it. Ok, rant over, let’s forget the Trackball and move on…..

Applications The NDrive S300 comes with Windows Mobile® 6 Professional so all the usual programs are in situ. As I mentioned earlier, other than the NDrive GPS software, there is very little extra shipped with the S300. The only extra programs included are: Windows Live Messenger. Java - for running small Java applets. SIM Manager - allows you to copy contacts between the SIM card and the S300. Windows Live - various services from the Windows Live Mobile stable. NDrive – The bundled GPS navigation software. Worldcard Mobile – Business card scanning software for use with the internal camera. There’s not a huge amount there to get excited about unfortunately. The GPS software as I said before is a nice application, and the Worldcard mobile software could be handy if you’re out and about. All in, that's not a lot of enhanced functionality but then I guess the device is aimed firmly at the GPS user. There are a couple of tweaks to the base software like the Wireless Manager and dialler skin that look quite nice, and further applications along these lines would have been a welcome addition. On other third party devices like those from Eten and the i-mate of old we have seen bundled applications such as Spb Mobile Shell or Pocket Plus. I would have liked to have seen some kind of Today screen enhancement application along these lines but sadly there is nothing like this included.

ROM and Memory The S300 has only been designed with 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM. This is the very least amount required to run Windows Mobile 6. It can always be enhanced by the use of a MicroSD storage card of capacity up to 32GB theoretically as the S300 can take an SDHC card. Personally I’m not one for installing thousands of applications on my device so this is not too much of an issue from a storage perspective. Unfortunately though, the miserly 64MB RAM does mean that if you’re using the device for GPS navigation you’re likely to need to close your GPS application to do anything else. Even taking a call while the GPS is running leaves the machine struggling as it shares what little resources are available. Given the S300’s underwhelming software suite, for general usage there is enough storage available, but you power users are going to be left wanting.

Camera The S300 comes with a 2 mega pixel camera. 3MP has become the standard for this generation of devices from the likes of HTC et al, although some of the lower spec devices, like the S300, still ship with 2MP. As we all know though, it's not all about the size of your pixel count so how does the image quality of the S300 hold up? As you can see from the example photographs below the camera produces a reasonably nice image (for a phone camera) and although the colours are nice enough it’s just not sharp enough. I don’t think you could produce even a small (6x4) print from these images. The images would look pretty good on a digital photo frame but that would be about your lot. As you can see, the cameras from other devices are producing much livelier, crisper images. As ever another fault with the camera on the S300 is the lack of a flash. Often devices ship with a "flash" or LED compensation light as it is known and although it makes very little difference in poor light, it’s helpful for those obligatory "self portrait" shots when you've had one too many. Without any kind of flash though, low light, or incandescent light shots are very poor. One small plus point with the camera is the macro focus switch. This helps somewhat for close up shots.

Example Photographs

PC Integration It was nice to see both ActiveSync 4.5 and Windows Mobile Device Centre bundled with the S300. Obviously this caters for both Vista and XP users. I didn't experience any issues with XP or Vista, and my Vista SP1 installation auto detected the S300 and even had a nice image displayed in WMDC too. Lovely.

Pros and Cons

Low price tag	It’s large
Generally responsive	Poor camera
External MicroSD access	Trackball! Grrrr…..
Can see SDHC cards	Low ROM & RAM
Good battery life	Older design
Great supplied GPS navigation software	No 3G/HSDPA
Good array of external controls
Big powerful battery

Overall Conclusion Reviewing the NDrive S300 has been an experience akin to stepping back in time to 2006. I quite liked the device itself, and from a performance perspective it delivers as a machine with this specification should do, but no more. The reason it’s like stepping back two years is that the hardware and design very much feels like its old news. The exterior is grey and dull rather than black or white and shiny as the trend seems to be now. There is no 3G, let alone HSDPA and, considering its internals, the device is 50% bigger than the present day equivalent machine from say ASUS or HTC. It hasn’t been an unwelcome trip back to 2006 though. The GPS system is a very good one, and the device just works. I didn’t experience any unwelcome crashes or soft resets at all so it seems to be nice and stable for at least a week or so. Add to this the tiny, tiny price tag and you have yourself a bit of a quandary. The bottom line is it’s a cheap and cheerful GPS Smartphone. No bling, and no surprises. Is this enough for you?