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Media
Viewing photos on the Xda Guide is a pleasure thanks to HTC's gallery system. This allows you to zoom in on pictures by tracing a circle with your finger on the screen. The centre of the circle becomes the centre of the zoom, so it's easy to get straight into the corner of a pic. You can also view a slideshow by brushing your finger across the screen to bring up the next pic
The music player is a decent one with cover art displayed where available and you can adjust the sound with a ten-band graphic equaliser.
We were pleasantly surprised that the below-par supplied headphones come with an adaptor for the USB plug, so you can easily upgrade to your own 3.5mm plug-packing pair
Internet
The Xda Guide's default browser is Opera, which we're always glad to see, though you can also use Internet Explorer if you wish. It's quick and intuitive, with the ring around the D-pad allowing you to zoom, or you can double tap on the screen at the point you want to focus on
But it's such a shame that there's no accelerometer on board to flip the screen's resolution to landscape mode – always a better way to view web pages. It would have helped a lot with the cramped keyboard too.
Other features
Office Mobile comes as standard, so you can create and view Word and Excel documents, as well as read PowerPoint docs and PDFs.
Memory
There's 512MB of ROM on board, which you can increase to 32GB via microSDHD card. With 256MB of RAM on board the Qualcomm MSM 7225 528MHz processor is decently fast, even with several apps running at once.
Battery
Battery life isn't the worst we've seen, but it's certainly not the best either. Despite claiming six hours of talk time and up to 400 hours standby we were only able to coax about a day of moderate use out of it, although admittedly battery-draining Wi-Fi was switched on the whole time
This being a Windows Mobile device, there are a few tricks you can try to stretch the battery life, such as dimming the screen, reducing the screen save time and being scrupulous about the amount of apps you have running at any given time.
