HTC’s S620 is a Windows Mobile handset that provides a qwerty keyboard and decent-sized screen in a slim design that is less burdensome to carry than many rival devices. Workers who need a phone with mobile email access should find the device an excellent compromise between candybar-style handsets and the larger, more cumbersome Pocket PC Phone models.

The S620, available now through resellers such as Expansys, weighs 130g and is about the size of a pack of playing cards. It is a quad-band phone supporting GPRS and 802.11b/g Wireless LAN for data connections, plus Bluetooth for synchronisation and linking to wireless headsets. It also features an integrated 1.3 megapixel camera.

HTC has based the S620 on the smartphone edition of Windows Mobile 5.0 rather than the Pocket PC Phone edition. This means the device is keyboard-driven rather than having a touch screen and stylus. It also means that the device does not come with Microsoft’s Mobile Office applications for creating and editing documents and spreadsheets as standard. However, it does include Westtek’s ClearVue suite, which lets users view Office files and PDFs.

In tests we welcomed the stylus-free user interface, which makes it possible to operate the device with just one hand much of the time. As well as a five-way navigator control, the S620 has two function keys that correspond to options displayed at the bottom of the screen, plus a Home key to return to the main screen and a Back key to cancel actions or go back a page when web browsing.

The S620 also has the familiar green “call” and red “hang up” buttons seen on standard phone handsets. Pressing the green button displays a dialling window where users can key in a number directly, or select a name from the list of existing contacts.

HTC has designed the S620 with a touch-sensitive strip it calls Joggr. This can be used to scroll the display up and down and is also user-configurable, but is placed directly to the right of the display, just where most users will grasp the handset. For this reason, we disabled Joggr in the settings menu.

The S620’s qwerty keyboard is smaller than that of a typical BlackBerry device, but vastly better than trying to compose SMS texts or emails on a standard phone keypad. We found we could type at reasonable speed using thumbs, but some users may find the keys a little small. Finding symbols such as @ or underscore can be tricky on many handhelds, but the S620 has a fairly straightforward colour-coding scheme that makes it easy to see which symbols can be accessed by pressing a blue “FN” (function) key.