i-mate JAQ3 Review

After i-mate severed their relations with HTC, they had to find the right producer for their phones, in order to continue their existence as a trademark. After the misconception called JAQ, JAQ3 is one of the first products, marking the first stage in the trademark’s development. The phone targets the consumers, aspiring for the full functionality of Windows Mobile for PocketPC OS and the hardware QWERTY keyboard that would always be there for them to use, but at the same time wouldn’t give up on the display’s QVGA resolution, choosing a quadrangular-display phone like Treo (750, 700w, 700wx) or HP (iPAQ 6500 and iPAQ 6900).

The phone’s set includes:

• Phone
• Charger
• Mini-USB cable
• Headset
• Carrying leather pouch
• Extra stylus
• Manuals and CD with software

JAQ3 is a black candybar phone, quite large even for a PocketPC keyboard device. Placed next to a medium-sized PPC phone like HTC Wizard, it looks huge. However, it is still one of the slimmest PocketPC Phones on the market with the enviable width of only 0.6” (14.5mm).

Model	Dimension (Inches)	Dimension (MM)	Weight (OZ)	Weight (Gramms)
i-mate JAQ3	5.0" x 2.6" x 0.6"	126 x 67.5 x 14.5	5,6	160
Motorola Q	4.6" x 2.5" x 0.5"	116 x 63 x 11.5	4,1	115
Samsung Blackjack	4.4" x 2.3" x 0.5"	113 x 59 x 11.8	3,5	100
Palm Treo 750	4.4" x 2.3" x 0.9"	111 x 58 x 22	5,4	154
HP IPAQ 6900	4.7" x 2.8" x 0.7"	118 x 71 x 18	6,3	180
HTC TyTN	4.4" x 2.3" x 0.9"	112.5 x 58 x 22	6,2	176
Eten M700	4.6" x 2.3" x 0.8"	117.5 x 59 x 19.8	5,8	165

Despite being made wholly of plastic, it is still rather heavy (5.64оz / 160 grams) and it can be felt even when carried in its leather case. Its weight is well-balanced and it is easy to balance and to handle it even with one hand. Although we don’t appreciate the touch of plastics, the structure is solid and the phone gives a nice feeling when held in the hand. The most widely-spread problem, the battery’s lid, is not present here and the phone stays steadily in place.





A large keyboard and the display above it are fitted on the front panel. It is just 2.5’’, which is small compared to most other PPC phones, but this is necessary so that room can be made for the keyboard. It is landscape-oriented, which is a specific feature of its interface. The display’s QVGA resolution shows 65,536 colors (a standard for Windows devices) and the image is very clear with authentic colors, while the sharpness is a little more pronounced, compared to the standard sharpness of a touch display. However, in very bright light you will have to shadow it, in order to be able to read what’s on it. The small size is a disadvantage.



The terrific keyboard is just below. It is always on the front panel and therefore it is frequently used, unlike some other devices where you have to open a slider, so that the keyboard shows up (HTC TyTN, HTC Wizard, Eten M700 ...). In its upper end there are two rows of system keys, closely fitted one next to the other, but their relief (bulging in the middle) makes them easy to feel and to press. The five-direction large silver D-pad is in the middle, featuring a black central key. It is also very convenient, but with our phone going upwards was sometimes a problem.


The keys with the letters are fitted below; they are considerably smaller, but are spaced out. Just like the system keys they are not flat, but bulging in the middle and are easy to feel. The keys are fun to press, with tactiле feedback and, on the whole, typing on this keyboard is sheer pleasure.

The keyboard is black and the numeric keys are light grey, so that they can stand out. Althought they are positioned on the right, dialing a number with either hand is not a problem. They are lit in white, while the alternative characters are lit in blue, so that they are seen well in any condition of lighting.



The phone has been designed so that it can be used with one hand and definitely does a good job here. There are four shortcut buttons on the front panel: messaging and internet (with changeable functions), windows and ok/close, which are pre-programmed. On the left there is a jog-dial scroll with a confirming OK button and the camera shortcut, also with changeable function. The power button, typical for all PocketPC phones, is situated on the same level, but on the right side; we would rather it was higher up, to make it easier to press.


A 2.5mm stereo jack for plugging in headphones or other audio accessories, and the miniUSB connector for plugging in a computer connector cable for a charger cable are situated on the right-hand side. Thanks to the availability of standard connectors you could use accessories for all kinds of phones.

The telescopic stylus, which is rather difficult to pull out, is in the lower right corner. Since it cannot be felt, you should know its features very well and grip it from behind, where there is a hole. You put your finger in that hole and push the stylus outwards until it sticks out a little before you can pull it out, which is not an easy operation either. The infrared and the microSD memory slot, allowing hot-swapping (changing the memory cards without switching the phone off) are in the upper part.

A „Reset” button, which is normally available in all Windows Mobile ‘s PocketPC phones is unaccountanbly missing. These phone need this feature, because they need to be restarted quite often. Unfortunately, JAQ3 is not an exception in this respect and when it is stuck, you will have to take off the battery and undertake the hard restart, instead of just being able to press „Reset”.

Our JAQ3 uses Windows Mobile 5 for Pocket PC Phones, but the new lot, which the manufacturer will launch on the market, will be using Windows Mobile 6 Professional. A ROM-update is expected soon in clubimate.com, which would allow you to install the new operational system on JAQ3.

Interface:

The landscape display determines also the peculiarities of the phone’s interface, compared to a regular PocketPC. The other models are also designed to use the horizontal vision, but the optimization has been made for portrait orientation. In a standby mode or when opening the main menu there is too much space to the side, but too little height, which demands scrolling or using a smaller size.

When pressing the green receiver you will not see the Last Call number, since the height is not enough. We find this quite inconvenient, because we use it very often.

As a WM PPC Phone, JAQ3 can be customized in many different ways and the easiest one is changing the visual themes. If you have to use more advanced software, the phone can be adjusted to perfectly suit your needs.

Phonebook:

The phonebook has no restriction on the amount of contact that can be added – it only depends 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! 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.

Another major drawback is that a Missed Call number cannot be added to an already existing contact. To do this, you first have to add it as a new one and then Cut and Paste the number into the contact you want. These complex manipulations not only lose your time, but there’s also a chance that you lose the number. That’s what we experienced. We cut the number, then copied another text by mistake, and the number was gone. That’s a problem with all WM 5 PPC phones, not only with this one.

Dialer:

Dialing is done after pressing the ANSWER button, no matter which menu you’re currently in. A large numeric keypad is visualized, featuring buttons that are easily pressed even without a stylus. You can also start dialing by typing a numeric key from the home screen. Speed Dial and Call History are the other two shortcut buttons. The first one is a standard one as particular number is assigned to numbers 0-9. The Call History is a list displaying all call activity of the phone (incoming/outgoing/missed). You can easily dial a recently used number when viewing this menu.



Organizer:

Alarms can be directly accessed through the home screen. 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. Maybe they should have been a few more, as we wouldn’t mind having five plus alarms in our pocket computer.

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.

The Calendar can be viewed for a particular year/month/week/day. Appointments are easily added to a certain date and alarms can also be assigned to them. When viewing a particular day, hours are displayed in red and blue background respectively for the “light” and “dark” hours of the day, instead of indexing them with PM and AM – this is done for saving your time.

Tasks are added via the Task menu and each of them can be assigned a date for activation and a priority; you can easily indicate that a certain task has been completed by placing a tick next to it in the list with all the tasks – thus it will not be displayed on your home screen as uncompleted.

The Calculator is simple but its buttons are relatively big and can easily be pressed with your fingers. Features like scientific calculator and unit converter are still missing.

The phone features a complete set of voice commands which are also speaker independent. The voice commands menu is entered by pressing the small button on the left side; after that you can easily select or find a particular contact there. Digit dialing is also supported; it’s quite possible that the phone has a problem recognizing your contacts’ names, but that also depends on the person who’s using it (although it’s speaker independent).

For better voice recognition, different commands can be trained, as well as the names in the phonebook. “Training” is actually done by recording a voice tag for each command or number.

Messaging:

Different message types are placed in a single menu - SMS, MMS and e-mails. There is nothing unexpected here. Entering text is done by the QWERTY ore one of the following touch display methods:
• Block Recognizer
• Keyboard
• Letter Recognizer
• Transcriber

As the QWERTY is always on the front side, it will be used in almost any situation. Still, if you don’t want to use it, the on-screen keyboard is the fastest and most convenient way to type. The other methods are also usable, but the hardware keyboard is much better.

Everything is standard in the e-mail menu; there’s an option for downloading headers only and you can also set a limit in KB per message. EDGE data is supported but it is much slower than 3G (UMTS/HSDPA).

Connectivity:

JAQ 3 is a quad-band GSM/EDGE phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), operating on all continents and locations with a GSM network. The lack of 3G determines the slow Internet connection when using a connection to the operator, which we consider to be a major disadvantage, provided that most contemporary PPC phones have this feature.

The local connection can be done using a number of methods; you can resort either to infrared (which is hardly ever used) or Bluetooth. Bluetooth v1.2 with many profiles is maintained, including a stereo audio profile. In theory, it would perform worse than v2.0 as far as the data transfer speed is concerned. The availability of WiFi ensures the convenience of using local wireless networks, using the 802.11b and 802.11g standards. The phone would find the networks in its scope automatically and would ask you whether to connect to those networks. Therefore, you now have access to an Internet connection, with a speed, which is much higher than those of the EDGE.

The computer connection is done by a Bluetooth a miniUSB-USB cable. As in the case of any Windows Mobile phone, you would need the ActiveSync software, which would help you synchronize the phone easily with Microsoft Office Outlook.

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. We normally turn the display’s orientation to landscape, but here it is this way by default. 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.

The smaller the display size is, the harder the sites are previewed. The internet browser is a good example why we don’t like small displays.

Camera:

The phone avails of an in-built digital camera with a 2 megapixel resolution. This is a regular resolution for this class of phones, but what matters more is what pictures actually look like.

The camera starts 4-5 after the button on the left is pressed and held down. The interface has few settings on the left-hand side and a viewfinder on the right. The settings include the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation levels, which we advise you not to try to adjust. You’ll be able to change the whiteness balance or to use color effects by using the menu. You could adjust it so that it takes pictures in a Portrait orientation, which means that the height of the picture will be bigger than its width. You will not be able to take pictures of objects that are too close to you, because of the lack of Macro mode.



You could use either the 3GP or the MPEG4 format to record video, but in both cases you’ll be limited by the low resolution of 176x144 pixels. This means that the clips, played on a computer or on any other device featuring a higher resolution (even on the phone) would be very small. The videos can be limited to 15 or 30 seconds or not to be limited in time.

The camera is relatively fast and 6 seconds after taking a picture of the highest possible quality you’ll be able to take another one. The inconvenience is that, although the button on the left serves as a shutter, it does not confirm that the picture has been taken and you have to use the left software key for that purpose. The latter key can be used to take pictures as well.

We have been disappointed by the pictures made by the camera. An advantage is their good exponation and the natural, comparatively authentic colors. A disadvantage is that the detail level is comparatively low and when looked upon at 100% the pictures look blurred. After a resizing to a lower resolution (e.g. 1024х768) and a sharpening procedure, most pictures look fine, although the resolution is far from the advertised 2 megapixels.

Media Player:

Just as most PocketPC phones, this one features a preloaded Windows Media Player, representing a combines music and video player. It maintains the standard MP3, AAC, WAV, WMA music formats and the MPEG4/H.263, 3GPP and WMV video formats.
The interface is not the most convenient one, but it’s usable. After a memory scan, all files are automatically added and then they are arranged under Artist, Album and Genre for the music and under Genre for the videos.

During playback, the interface buttons are quite small and it is advisable to use the stylus. When listening to music an empty space shows without any obvious reason, which is otherwise used for visualizing the videos, This problem could be solved by changing the player’s skin or of the player itself.

The video files can be viewed also in fullscreen of the QVGA resolution. Here, too, the negative effect is caused by the small size of the display.
The weak processor has an impact on the viewing of the video files and the MPEG4 video with QVGA resolution could not be normally viewed, since the picture is lagging behind. What is strange is that on another phone, using the same processor (HTC Wizard) the video does not avail of all its frames and looks slightly discontinuous, although the picture is in real time.

The sound from the loudspeaker is rather loud, so it’s better to use headphones when listening to music. The headphones, provided with the set, are nothing special and the sound quality is low, but you could easily plug in standard wire headphones by using an adapter to 3.5 mm or Bluetooth headphones working with the A2DP profile.

Software:

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 PPC 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. Many more could be downloaded from third party sources.

I-mate have personalized the phone by adding additional software. The communication manager is not the standard one, although it offers the standard functionality. You shall be able to use Backup and I-View applications.

Backup is the application, copying the information from your phone to an on-line server. You register and then you let it back-up, which is usually done rather slowly. We used a WiFI connection, which is the quickest possibility for JAQ3 and in about 15 minutes we were from 80 to 32 . This is done so slowly, because the phone back-ups not only a few Kilobites of saved contacts, the messages and the other personal information, but also multimedia files like pictures and videos. From our point of view this is useless and we believe that there should have been just the possibility to save the contact data, which would have taken under a minute. We personally prefer the Eten application, which saves the data on the memory card or on the in-built one.

1-View connects to the Internet through the same account BUT it is actually a kind of a FTP browser. The program arranges your files in different categories that you can view on your phone or through a computer, using an on-line interface. Each file from your phone or from your computer can be uploaded on the i-mate server and can be downloaded from another device respectively. For example, if you’re taking pictures with a camera, you can upload them through the program and you erase them from the memory. Then you (or someone else, who knows your user name and password) can download these files on a computer. Again, it makes sense only if you’re using the quick WiFi connection.

In addition to the 2 games, available on all PocketPC phones, i-mate have added three more, which are much more fun and entertaining: BlackJack, Pool and JAM-JAMMY. These versions of all three games have been ordered by the manufactures especially for his phones.

Overall performance

Performance:

We were disappointed by the speed of JAQ3. We didn’t expect it to be the fastest PocketPC phone, provided the 200 MHz TI OMAP processor, but it proved to be much slower than other phones using the same processor. Often you have to wait when going through the menus, while heavier applications, e.g. games, make it even harder for the phone. Its poor performance was most strongly felt when watching a video: it just couldn’t visualize correctly.

We usedSpb Benchmark to compare the JAQ3 system performance with other PocketPC Phones.



JAQ3 is not a champion in the ‘strength of reception’ discipline either, but it is good anyway. It manages to keep the signal in places with poorer reception, but it is weaker, compared to the HTC Wizard. (6.5/10), which we use as reference.

The sound during conversation depends to a great extent on how you handle the phone. Our first remark here is on the position of the microphone: instead of using the standard position in the phone’s lower part, it is situated under the emailing button, over the QWE keyboard. When talking on the phone you have to hold it in a specific manner, so that it does not touch your cheek and mute the microphone. Furthermore, since it on the left, holding the phone to your right ear ensures better results than holding it to your left one, since in the former case the microphone is closer to your mouth.

We would also like to point out that, because of the upwards location of the display, it happened quite often for us to press the „Mute” or “Hold” button without realizing it, when talking on the phone.

The microphone itself is not the best one either. They can hear you very well on the other end, but your voice sounds shrilly and slightly remote, as if you were on the speakerphone. If you try to hold the phone close to your cheek with your shoulder, it’ll be difficult for the person on the other end to understand you, because the microphone in this case will ‘drill’ into your face. Holding JAQ3 to the right ear, we had the benefit of a loud sound with very good quality.

The sound that you hear is all right, though a little muted. When holding the phone right, the sound improves considerably.

Conclusion:

JAQ3 has left us with mixed feelings: on the one hand, we like the form-factor very much (in spite of the big size) and the always-available keyboard, which is simply terrific, but on the other hand the convenience of working with the operational system (in spite of the great number of shortcut keys) is inadequate, since this system is more optimized for Portrait display. This makes us think of the square-display phones (like Treo 750 and HP 6900-series), which are somewhere in the middle but lose on the poorer resolution.

For us, the greatest disadvantage is the low quality of conversation (in case you aren’t holding the phone ‘correctly’) and the slow reactions, which should be optimized. However, maybe this is the price you have to pay for being ‘unique’ since JAQ3 and JAQ are the only PocketPC phones in this form-factor. If the above-mentioned shortcoming of JAQ3 prevent you from purchasing it, but you still want a Windows Smartphone with a keyboard that is always accessible, there a few options we can recommend: to buy one of the popular smartphones like Samsung BlackJack and Motorola Q (Q9) or to compromise with the 80 pixels of the display width and to opt for Treo 750 (700) or HP 6900 (6500) series. However, if you don’t want to switch to the Smartphone version nor to the smaller resolution, JAQ4 will probably overcome the problems of its predecessor.