HTC Mogul Review

The HTC Mogul, a version of the P4000 Titan, comes as a replacement for the PPC-6700 in Sprint’s lineup and the XV-6700 for Verizon . A generous package of features and options is packed into a phone with a touch display and a full QWERTY keyboard and still manages to retain a medium size. The question that remains is can the Mogul provide a great package and strong performance at the same time? We’ll see over the next few pages.

Package contents

• HTC Mogul
• Manual and setup CD
• Case
• Charger
• USB Splitter
• USB/2.5mm jack splitter
• USB cable
• Screen protector
• Extra stylus
• 512MB microSD card
  

If you read our review on the T-Mobile Wing, you may find yourself asking, “Isn’t this the same phone?” Well, kind of. See, both phones are made by HTC (High Tech Computer Corp.) and are very similar but there are major differences at the same time. The biggest differences are that the Mogul is a CDMA phone, layout, and the look and feel.

Looking at the phone, you notice that while it’s elegant in its gray finish, it’s also very busy. There are many shortcut keys laid out across the phone to help cut down on fumbling through the menu. As we give you’re a tour around the phone, we will discuss these and point out what their function is.

Model	Dimension (Inches)	Dimension (MM)	Weight (OZ)	Weight (Gramms)
HTC Mogul	4.33" x 2.32" x 0.72"	110 x 59 x 18.5	5,8	165
T-Mobile Wing	4.29" x 2.32" x 0.66"	109 x 59 x 17	5,9	168
Cingular 8525	4.4" x 2.3" x 0.86"	112.5 x 58 x 22	6,2	176
Blackberry 8800	4.5" x 2.6" x 0.6"	114 x 66 x 14	4,7	134

The front is still dominated by a 2.8” 65k color TFT touch display with a resolution of 240 x 320. Its dimensions are 4.3” x 2.3” x 0.7” (110 x 59 x 18.5 mm) and weighs 5.8oz (165g). While it’s on the larger side of phones, it’s still very comfortable to hold. While it doesn’t have the tendency to slide out of your hand, we would have liked to see some kind of rubber grip available, even if it would only be the battery cover.

The display showed a very rich and sharp picture. The colors were shown in wonderful condition and the only time we had issues seeing the display was when the sun was shining directly only the display. As with most screens on phones, there will be difficulty viewing the display sideways with polarized sunglasses on. Just below the display, you’ll see the D-pad, left –and right soft touch keys, Windows key, the OK key, and the call and hang-up keys. Located above the display is the speaker with an Internet Explorer shortcut to the right and the messaging shortcut to the left. Just next to the speakers are located two notification LED’s. These will inform you if Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is turned on, if you are charging the phone and when it’s charged, and if there is signal.

At the bottom of the phone, you will find the MicroSD card slot, miniUSB port, and the IR port. There is no cover to either the MicroSD or miniUSB port so there is no fumbling with getting the card in or out or plugging in the unit.

Located on the left side are the scroll wheel, OK button, voice command shortcut button, and the Wi-Fi switch. The scroll wheel has two functions. When listing to music or in a call, the wheel will adjust the volume. When looking through the menu, it will let you scroll through the menu and pushing it in will select what has been highlighted.


The right side holds the camera, communication manager, power buttons, and the stylus. Like the Wing, pressing the power button will turn off the display. Unless a message or call is received, the only way to turn it back on is to press the power button. The stylus contracts to fit into a much smaller place. Pulling it out will extend it and when placing it back, it will contract to its smaller size.

Unlike the Wing, the Mogul has a more tradition battery cover. While it still takes up almost the entire back, it does not wrap around to make up the bottom of the slider. Due to its design, it still does not have any movement. In the top right-hand corner are the camera and flash. It’s nice to see that there is a flash but it would be nice to see a mirror as well. To the right, there is a hands-free speaker and a port to connect an antenna too.

Removing the battery cover, which proved to be a little difficult, revealed the 1500mAH Li-ion polymer battery. The battery took up most of the back.

Interface:

HTC Mogul is Windows Mobile 6 Professional device and as a whole, its software and possibilities are almost entirely identical to the other phones using the same operating system. If you know it, then the possibilities offered by the phone including phone book, organizer, messages, media player, etc. won’t surprise you and will be familiar to you. Therefore you should bear in mind that certain problems and positive features of theirs are valid not only for the phone or make’s models, but for the models using this operating system (WM6 Professional), too.

Phonebook:

The phone book of WM6 is not much different from the phone book of WM5. It has no restriction on the amount of contact that can be added, depends only on the memory available. When you open the phonebook all contacts are displayed as a list; each field consists of the name and the number of the contact, while a letter placed beside them indicates what the type of the number is (w – work; m – mobile, etc.). Pictures are not displayed even if there is one attached to the contact.

The line displayed at the top of the screen is a search field, which starts searching through the names and numbers on entering a symbol – the more symbols you type, the more accurate the match is – it’s quite useful! This one searches all names entered for the contact, but if you want to find by other field like “company” for example, you have to use the “Search” application. There are tabs with different letters (divided in groups of three) just below it. This way you can arrange the contacts so that only the ones beginning with a given letter are displayed. These two search features are quite handy and they make finding a particular contact in the phonebook very quick.


Too bad that’s not the case when adding a new name to the phonebook; the device offers way too many capabilities, including multiple work and home numbers, but there’s only one for mobile –something quite inconvenient as that’s exactly where we wanted to add multiple numbers to. The numerous address, e-mail and other address fields confuse you even further – it would have been a lot easier if the most frequently used fields are highlighted in some way. We would choose this to be done with the Name, Picture, Mobile number and e-mail fields and thus finding them would have been easy, eliminating the need to go through the long list.

Personal photos and ringtones can be assigned to each contact; there’s no restriction on the size of the pictures but they are visualized in very small size even on an incoming call – we think they are useless. You can also add a note to each contact.

The problem of WM5 because of which you couldn’t add an unknown number from the call history to an existing contact, is eliminated here.

Dialer:

You can dial a number not included in your contacts by inputting its numbers. This can be done by either bringing up the digital keyboard or by using the physical keyboard. To display this digital keyboard you have to press the green receiver once. When using the physical keyboard, the same display will show and you just have to start dialing the number. You will see information on the last dialed number and you can call it by pressing the green receiver again.

Pressing the buttons you will start imputing the digits of a possible number, but at the same time you will search the phone book as if imputing a text by a predictive text input system. So, to call John you can press 5-6-4-6 and the matching contacts will be visualized in the list.

Organizer:

Alarms can be directly accessed through the home screen, by tapping on the clock. They are three, and they all can be configured to be active for certain days of the week, and you can also assign names and different sounds to each of them. All alarms can be active simultaneously, and overall they are easy to use and do what they are supposed to. We are rather disappointed that their number is limited to three, as it was in the previous version of the OS.

The next tab in this menu is the clock; there is a field called Visiting next to it which can be used as a World Clock – select another location and the phone starts using its local time. The clock has an option to be displayed on the title bar of all the menus, which is handy.

In the phone menu you can find your electronic calendar where you can save your appointments. They have fields for subject, starting/ending time/all day event, location, notes. You can use options like: reminder (PRIOR NOTICE 1/5/10/15/30/45 minutes, 1/2/3/4/5/6 hour/day/week), recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, every (same date-and-month) for every year, sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). You can also add attendees (required or optional) from your contacts where e-mail addresses have been added and where meeting requests will be sent.


Examining the calendar can be done by day/week/month and you can choose starting day for the week and the week duration (5-6-7-day week). The appointments for the day are clearly shown in their time limits, so you can see your free time at a glance. This is one of the new things of WM6 compared to WM5.

The Mogul offers voice speed dial but a tag needs to be added to the desired action so this cuts down on the function quite a bit. This does provide on voice commands that are specific to you but to get them, there is a lot more work involved. It would be nice to see a system where you speak into the phone to a present pattern or words so that the phone learns your voice.

Messaging:

Different message types are placed in a single menu - SMS, MMS and e-mails. There is nothing unexpected here. If you do not wish to use the built-in keyboard then entering text is done by one of the following touch display methods:

• Block Recognizer
• Keyboard
• Letter Recognizer
• Transcriber
  

We think that the on-screen keyboard is the fastest and most convenient way to do it, but if you train the other methods, they can also be quite handy! Combined with the T9 predictive system, entering text with the phone is really quick.

Just a few steps away is the option to add your e-mail account (POP3 or IMAP) and to use it on your mobile phone. Windows Mobile 6 already supports HTML formatted e-mails. The client is very similar to the Outlook on a computer, you can filter your inbox to see just some results, reply to message or forward it to other person. The support for attachments allows you to download or send one, in addition to the text body. The phone can be set to synchronize with your company Exchange Server.

As standard, Windows Mobile comes preloaded with the mobile version of Live! Messenger (MSN). Windows Live account will be added in Messaging when you add your e-mail account. You can also choose to use third party application such as AIM, Yahoo! Chat and ICQ.

Connectivity:

Mogul is a dual-band (800/1900) CDMA phone. Standard for a smartphone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are available. Bluetooth is mainly used for connecting to other nearby devices, as accessories (earpieces, car-kits, multimedia devices) and for data transfer (transfer of files to/from another phone/PC). Like all other Windows phones, you need to have ActiveSync installed on the computer to connect to it. The program will let you easily synchronize the phone (contacts, emails, and organizer) with Outlook.

With Wi-Fi you can connect to a wireless LAN network covering you, use it as an Internet source and view the shared documents (input \\name-of-computer in Internet Explorer and you will see what is shared). There is also the possibility to use EV-DO REV.A to surf the web when a wireless network is not in range.

We did have a few issues connecting to Wi-Fi networks at times. If a username and password were required, the screen tended to disappear before we finished typing in the information. Also, connected to networks with any type of security caused headaches and though we were able to connect finally, this was only after much work.

Internet:

The mobile version of Internet Explorer is used for internet browsing; loading standard pages in full size is not a problem, because of the relatively high resolution (320x240 pixels) of such devices but you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically almost all the time. If you want to read a text, it is almost sure you will not be able to fit the whole row in those 240 (or 320 if you put the phone in landscape mode) pixels. Full-screen usage is almost mandatory when the page has loaded.


There is also One Column View option which eliminates the need for horizontal scrolling but increases the need for vertical scrolling. The page is narrowed and thus it changes its initial look. As it is a Pocket PC, you can always use third party software to replace the original one.

Camera interface

Camera:

The Mogul is equipped with a 2MP camera. There is a flash but since it is not a xenon flash, the range is very limited. In dark environments, it may help a little but there is little use for it if the object is a foot or further away. Once the shortcut is pressed, the interface comes up in about 2 seconds. To hold the camera upright, you have to hold it in the same direction as you would when using the physical keyboard. The camera makes full use of the widescreen and has to be held sideways, as if the keyboard was extended.

The layout is similar to the interface of other models (P3300). Once the shortcut is pressed to take a photo, the Mogul takes the picture almost immediately. About 4 photos can be taken within a 10 second period.

Picture quality is decent. The closer in that the object is, the better the quality of the photo. Due to the lack of autofocus, some photos did come out of focus.



Multimedia:

The Mogul is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player. It is a multimedia player for music and video files. MP3 format is supported, as well as WMA and WAV. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.

The supported video formats are MPEG4/H.263, WMV and 3GP, while the quality of the latter is pretty low. They can be viewed in fullscreen and the picture quality is quite good and looks very nice on the almost-three-inch display. Although the processor is not very fast, we are happy that no frames are skipped.

There are three methods of listening to music in the Mogul: the speaker on the back, USB or 2.5mm headset, or Bluetooth headsets. The speaker on the back does very well considering its size. At full volume, the sound is very loud but is lacking on precision. The vocals can be drowned out easily by instruments but once the volume is turned down a little, the lyrics can be heard much better.

When using headsets that have been supplied with the phone, the sound is much clearer and precise. Even at max volume, the sound is sharp and precise. Bass is lacking on the phone but for music on the go, it is a great device. So that you don’t have to use the volume rocker to adjust the volume, there is a volume control switch located on the headphones. As with all headsets provided with cell phones, the switch also has a built-in MIC and a button to accept and end calls. Unfortunately, the Mogul does not offer a 3.5mm jack but instead uses the USB connection to connect to USB headsets or 2.5mm headphones when the adapter is used.

The final method of listening to music is with Bluetooth headset. A2DP (the profile for Stereo Bluetooth) is supported so there is the ability to listen to music in stereo. The sound quality, while not terrible, leaves something to be desired. There are times where the music came in crackling or as an echo but this was very rare. While we wouldn’t recommend using this method, it is a decent replacement to the other methods.

Windows Media Player (WMP) can be controlled either by using the onscreen buttons or the d-pad. With the onscreen controls, there are the regular buttons seen on WMP, play/pause, fast-forward, rewind, skip, go-back, volume up and down. Using the d-pad, up and down will control the volume. Left sends you back to the beginning of the song or the previous song when pressed but if held will rewind. Right will skip to the next song when pressed or will fast-forward when held. Both rewind and fast-forward skip the song at 5 second intervals and do this very quickly. The center button acts as the play/pause button.

If a call is coming through, WMP will pause the song and then resume it once the conversation is over. The music player can also play in the background while other functions are being performed.

Software:

The Mogul has 256MB ROM and 64MB RAM. Internal memory capacity can be expanded through the microSD card slot. It comes preinstalled with Task manager, which is located on the top right corner of your homescreen. Here you can tap and close the loaded applications in a second, in order to free RAM memory.

WM for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software. The only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is easily solved by getting a memory card as there are microSD cards with capacity of up to several GB. Every WM6 Professional phone comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. The Office applications allow you to view and edit documents of the most-used types and the phone opens them without any error. Even a complicated Excel document with a few sheets is not a problem. Mogul also has Adobe PDF Reader preloaded, which like the Office works flawless. Many more programs could be downloaded from third party sources.


There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as much as the ones intended for PCs with Windows operating system. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc. You can download third party applications to be used instead of the preloaded ones.

Performance:

The Mogul has a very slow UI even with a 400MHz processor. It would have been great to see a much better more powerful processor but then the battery life might have been worse or the size of the phone might have increased in size. When sliding the keyboard, there is a delay of a few seconds before the UI switches to landscape view. Opening menus or loading programs is sluggish as well. This is a serious disadvantage as other smartphones have a much faster UI giving them a major advantage in this area.

To rotate the display, the keyboard can be extended or there is an icon at the bottom of the home screen (which looks like a phone with a stylus pointing at it) that can be pressed. With this icon, the screen can be rotated to the left, right, or standard view.

The load time for it managed to take quite a while. From completely turned off to fully load, it took the Mogul about 30 seconds.

We are happy that the Mogul can use Skype application for VoIP calls. Even though there is no HTC P4000 in the download, we successfully installed the version for the HTC P4350. The system lags, despite a faster processor than the Wing, when you are during a call, but still you will be able to switch to different tabs and send a chat message for example, while you talk. The Voice is not lagging if you are using fast internet connection. For Skype calls, Mogul uses the loudspeakers and you will not be impressed by its quality, but it is still usable. The other party hears you clear, but some echo also appears. For the test, we used Wi-Fi connection.

We used Spb Benchmark to compare the Mogul system performance with other PocketPC Phones. The phone performed well in all the tests that were thrown at it.

As a phone, the Mogul works wonderfully. Reception is strong and voice clarity is near perfect. Even at times where there were one to two bars available, we were able to hear the other party without problems and this low reception did not hinder the quality for the other party as well. With a talk time rating of 3.33 hours, it was nice to see that we managed to get 4 hours and 40 minutes talk time out of one charge. Standby time is rated for 228 hours but once the 30% mark is reached, the battery seems to drain fairly quickly.

Conclusion:

The Mogul is a wonderful phone regardless of whether you are looking for a business phone or one to use everyday. With a great email client, messaging system, and long talk-time, it should be easy to stay connected and perform your daily actions no matter where you are. Judging by the look of the Mogul alone, it does seems that it is geared towards businesses but it is not limited to this one category. The slow UI response may push some users to look at a BlackBerry, but the Mogul is no worse of a phone.

	Carrier	Price Today	Price after rebate
		$349.99	$250.00