Hands-on with the Gigabyte gSmart WM5 smartphone

PocketPC Thoughts got a chance to take a pre-production Gigabyte gSmart Windows Mobile 5 smartphone through its paces, and although you really need a QWERTY keyboard to get our attention, PPCT nonetheless makes the gSmart seem like a hot little number. As we all know by now, the gSmart rocks WM5 with AKU2 for push-email goodness, a 416MHz processor, analog TV and radio tuners, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 2.1 megapixel camera. The highlights here are definitely on the software side, though, as Gigabyte includes a number of extras out-of-the-box including a voice command app, answering machine option (record messages to SD instead of VM), call recorder, and some tweaks that you'd normally only get with paid add-ons like SPB PocketPlus. Downsides include the lack of a high speed data option (GPRS only, sorry), crappy TV reception, and short life from the included 850-mAh battery- still, there are a lot of tantalizing features here, and this looks to be a fairly popular model in all the non-U.S. countries where it'll be released.