Velocity Mobile 103 Review

Inside this Review

• Odyssey User Interface
• VOTA Update Manager
• Display
• Ports and Other Hardware Features
• Performance
• 3G Radio Performance
• GPS
• Digital Camera
• Battery Life
• First Generation Hardware Problems
• Specifications
• Conclusion

Odyssey User Interface

This smartphone runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, but Velocity Mobile has overlaid this with the Odyssey user interface.

The main user interface home screen template offers quick city weather and time information, as well as a quick access program bar that is brought into the display with a swipe of your fingertip.

The most important part of this is probably the quick access program bar.  The bar with four icons quickly appears with a simple stroke of your finger upward on the screen. This lets you tap to open programs, or press and hold in to give the option to close that program if it is still running in the background.

With the bar at the bottom of the screen, another upward flick of your finger brings up the entire program access list. You can either tap a program in this list to open it directly, or you can reposition items to bring more programs into the quick access bar, or remove current programs. If you have more than four in the bar, it lets you slide the group side to side to view icons not shown on the screen.

The first thing you see in the Odyssey user interface is city weather and time information. Upon the initial setup you are told to touch the clock area to select your city. You are given the choice of adding a city by name or showing nearby cities by your GPS location.

Most major cities are found in the user selection list, but unluckily for me, nothing shows up for Cincinnati, where my office is located. Indianapolis is also not found, so I ended up using New York City so I could at least have a time shown that was inside the same time zone. The GPS location feature also didn't work as planned, only displaying "Satellites in View: 5" and staying on that screen until I pressed done. If you lived in a very major city you might have better luck with these features.

VOTA Update Manager

Since I received my 103 review unit earlier this month, the Velocity Over-The-Air (VOTA) update manager has pulled in a couple of updates, with the most important one being a newer revision to the Odyssey UI.

The process is very painless, where you just tap the "check" button, and it looks to see if any updates are available. If it finds something, it gives you the option to download and install the update. In the case of the newer user interface, it installed in under a minute, and did not require a reboot.

One item the new user interface fixed was the "Show Nearby Cities by GPS" function, which now at least listed one city near my office in Cincinnati, OH. The "major" city it listed was Prestonsburg, KY, a town of 3,600 people. Not really the major US city I was hoping for.

Display

The 480-by-640-pixel display on the Velocity 103 is very nice, and very readable in full sunlight even at less than half screen brightness. Viewing angles are impeccable, with colors staying true and accurate even at the most extreme angles in all directions.

The touchpad is a semi-hard plastic surface that is flush with the top cover of the phone, and roughly 2-3mm above the LCD. It is very clear, not putting any noticeable haze in front of the LCD. Touch accuracy seems to be spot on, but requiring a firm tab under most circumstances to register correctly. Finger swipes in applications such as Opera or Google Maps worked much better, requiring only a light touch to register.

Ports and Other Hardware Features

The Velocity 103 has a few unique features not found on all Windows Mobile devices. The first is a trackball to give users additional control over the phone, for times when you might not want to use the touchscreen. For most applications it works just fine to move around web pages with slightly more accuracy than jabbing around with a stylus.

This smartphone also offers a composite video output through the 3.5 mm headphone jacked located on the bottom of the phone. If you have a few movies on your device, this gives you an option of a larger screen if you have a compatible display around you.

Ports and features on the phone were more than adequate, with a mini-USB port on the bottom for syncing, Internet sharing, and charging.

Users also get a microSD slot for memory expansion, accessible only if you remove the battery cover to "unlock" to slot cover. Note that you don't have to remove the battery or turn off the phone, you just have to remove the cover itself.

Included in the retail box along with the cables needed for operation is a slipcase to keep your phone out of harm's way when being stored in a pocket or briefcase. This little slipcase is made from cheap stretchy material that seemed to hold up just fine. 

Performance

The 400 MHz Qualcomm processor was probably not the best choice for a phone with a VGA screen. At times it seems to struggle and lag to process screen movements, noticed especially in the Odyssey user interface, and programs like Google Maps where the entire screen has to refresh quickly and fluidly.

Comparing this to my friendly HTC Mogul with the same configuration, but only a QVGA display, the Velocity 103 lags behind in almost all situations. In Google Maps just moving to a new location on the 103 appears very choppy, where on the Mogul it works in a very fluid motion.

Applications that were not as intensive worked without much lag, such as Outlook, parts of Internet Explorer, and the digital camera.

3G Radio Performance

On the AT&T Wireless network here on the outskirts of Cincinnati the Velocity 103 works very well in terms of download speeds and reception strength. Using the speedtest feature on MobileSpeedTest.com, the 103 managed an consistent 562 kpbs download speed with the HSDPA radio. Forcing the phone into EDGE mode (for extended battery life) it pulled down data at 239.70 kbps.

The phone is also equipped with an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connection, which seems to work just as well as my work notebook in terms of connection distance, but not as well as speed. While still managing an impressive 2.73 Mbps, notebooks on the same network were able to connect at 3-4 Mbps.

Using the phone as a wireless modem with my T60 Thinkpad works very well using Internet Connection Sharing from the phone. Using Speedtest.net, my laptop managed 657 kbps down and 342 kbps up. In areas with better 3G coverage and infrastructure you should probably see better speeds than I did in Cincinnati, OH.

GPS

The internal GPS works quite well inside my office building as well as outside in the streets.

Acquisition time the first time it tried to get a lock took between 4-5 minutes sitting on top of my car with a clear sky overhead. Once it got its first lock, each additional locks take only 20-30 seconds. Accuracy is spot on tracking the location in Google Maps.

Digital Camera

The 2.0 MPx camera on the Velocity 103 works very well, and in my eyes is one of the best cameras I have used on a cellphone (compared to BlackBerries, Motorola Q, etc).

Below are a few samples images that took outside around the office.

• Sample Picture
• Sample Picture
• Sample Picture

Battery Life

Battery life using the 3G radio seems very limited with an active data connection. After 2-3 hours with the 3G connection active the phone starts to complain about wanting to be plugged in with a very low main battery.

Locking the radio into slower modes such as GSM or just EDGE improved the daily performance quite a bit and is highly recommended if you only send and receive email and make calls with the phone.

First Generation Hardware Problems

The Velocity 103 is not without a few first generation hardware flaws, some related to hardware choices and other because of design problems.

The first item which could be seen as a flaw is the 400 MHz processor used in conjunction with the VGA screen. In almost all areas of navigation the phone lagged severely, in some cases a few seconds before the Odyssey access bar popped up, Start Menu loaded, or program screens loaded on the phone. The HTC Mogul with near the same configuration with a QVGA screen blew it away in nearly every instance, not having to process the added information of the larger screen.

The next flaw is the holder which directs the stylus straight at the top cover of the microSD slot when stowed. This scratched the very tip of the stylus every single time I put it into the slot, eventually carving a pretty big groove. As you can see in the picture at left, it doesn't look too pretty up close, and made me very cautious when using that stylus on the screen to not scratch it.

Taking the rear cover apart when I was originally tracking down the offending part, it appeared that the clearances are just too small inside the back of the case, and items are too close together. Perhaps with a redesign of the stylus holder section the problem would go away, but for users the easiest temporary fix would be storing the stylus in a safer location.

Velocity 103 Complete Specs

• Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• Qualcomm Mobile Station Modem (MSM) MSM7201 chipset
• GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
• UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA 850/1900/2100
• 2.8-inch 640x480 VGA touch screen
• Odyssey Interface
• Velocity Over The Air updates (VOTA)
• 256 MB ROM, 128 MB RAM
• Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, GPS
• 2.0 megapixel camera, 0.3 megapixel videoconferencing (secondary) camera
• Composite video out
• microSD expansion slot
• Battery: 1410 mAh Li-ion, 4 hours talk-time, 200 hours standby, 2.5 hours navigation
• Size: 4.44" x 2.28" x .58"
• Weight: 4.8 oz with battery

Conclusion

Overall the Velocity Mobile 103 gives a wide range of features, and best of all will only be sold in an unlocked model inside the U.S. Buyers get a beautiful 2.8-inch VGA screen with great viewing angles, 3G radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, video out, and dual digital cameras.

While the phone can lag at times with the current software setup, updates should be able to tweak that to give a better experience. The only serious flaw that I found was the stylus holder that scratched the tip of the stylus against the microSD slot cover. Hopefully that gets fixed before the phone hits shelves sometime this fall.