i-mate JAQ

i-mate’s is known for selling Windows Mobile phones developed by HTC, just like O2 and other brands, but their latest JAQ is the first of their phones that isn’t from HTC. It’s made by a relatively new company called Inventec, based out of Taiwan.

Design
The device is rather ugly and odd looking. It looks bulky, thanks to the keypad area being raised up along with the battery compartment on the rear. It seems like those two components were added on to the body of the phone at a later stage. So it definitely looks bulky, but its quite surprisingly light. This also works against it, making it feel very cheap and empty.

The display is a nice, 2.8-inch QVGA TFT capable of 64k colors. The display is quite bright and very readable indoors, but it loses its shine and gets completely washed out in bright sunlight. There is also no light sensor in the device that can automatically adjust the brightness of the screen based on ambient lighting conditions.

The display is also a touch-screen, so you can use your fingernails or the included stylus, the house for which is oddly located below the device on the left side. This positioning also gives the impression that the device was intended to be left-handed. The screen is inaccurate towards the bottom right hand side. In spite of several calibration attempts, it was always off around the bottom right edge.

Above the display, there are three dedicated LED notifications that inform you the status of incoming mail, Bluetooth and the battery level. This is useful when the device is in stand-by mode and the screen is turned off.

Keypad
Below the screen is a full QWERTY keypad for messaging on the phone. There is ample room between two adjacent keys, which can make keyboarding comfortable, but the thin, vertical capsule like shape of the keys is not as comfortable as it looks. There is an Fn key which is required to access the numbers and symbols on the keys. This doesn’t act like a shift key, so if you just want to add a comma or an exclamation, you need three key-presses to do so. A double-tap Fn lock would have been a good feature. Also, the numbers on the keypad aren’t colored or otherwise marked out in any way, which makes it difficult to find them easily. The numbers and symbols are in a dull orange color. Even the orange backlight doesn’t help much.

Above the keypad you have normal phone function keys such as the call and end keys, the two softkeys and the Windows key. Between the two soft keys is the five-way joystick which, due to its raised surrounding, isn’t very easy to operate by nudging it with fingers. I found it very irritating to use.
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Multimedia
The phone has the usual set of multimedia features with Windows Media player with support for audio and video playback, but the sound from the speaker phone is not loud enough in moderately noisy environments. Using MP3s as ringtones might not be such a good idea, as they will barely be audible.

The phone also comes with a standard 2.5mm stereo jack and a pair of bundled earphones. The quality of the earphones is average, and even those aren’t too loud.

There is no camera on the JAQ, since it is intended to be a business smartphone.

Tech
The phone is a quad-band GSM phone with support for GRPS and EDGE networks. It has Bluetooth 1.2 support with no A2DP stereo profile, slow USB 1.1 via a mini-USB jack at the bottom, and an infrared port on the top of the phone. There is no support for WiFi, which is always a welcome addition to any business communication offering.

Internally, the phone runs on a 200MHz TI OMAP processor. It has 128MB of ROM and around 64MB of ram to play around with. While this processor is not uncommon, performance of the device was on the lower side with sluggish response to most actions.

The phone also has a miniSD memory card slot on the right side of the phone, above the 2.5mm stereo jack socket. miniSD cards are hot-swappable on the JAQ.

It runs Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Edition AKU 2.5. You get your usual suite of Windows Mobile software such as Outlook, Internet Explorer Mobile, MSN Messenger, Windows Media Player Mobile and Pocket Office.
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Battery
A device that doesn’t include power-hungry features such as a camera and WiFi should offer good battery life, unfortunately, the JAQ only manges around 2-2.5 days on low to moderate use. If you use the phone regularly while accessing the Internet and playing music, you’re going to have to recharge this phone every night.

Fortunately, like most WinMo phones, the JAQ also has a standard mini-USB slot on the bottom from where it also recharges.

Conclusion
At Rs. 18,000 off the street, the JAQ doesn’t really provide much of a reason to choose it over the Nokia E61. The JAQ has a touch-screen, but an inaccurate, erroneous one, so the E61 is a better option. The E61 has WiFi, too.

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| i-mate JAQ