Voq Pro smart phone

A great idea - just a year too late?

Given the slot's proximity to the battery hatch, heaven only knows why Sierra didn't just put the memory card connector under the power pack, next to the SIM slot, the way everyone else does. The battery itself is moulded onto the hatch and is easy to remove. It's a 1050mAh job and yields a decent smart phone-standard charge duration. No complaints there.

Inside the phone is a 200MHz Intel XScale PXA262 processor. It's getting a little long in the tooth, this chip, but the Voq Pro didn't feel sluggish. My recent review of HTC's 'Blue Angel' PocketPC phone was criticised in one quarter for failing to point out that the machine's use of a 400MHz PXA263 processor rather than more up to date PXA270 was a major drawback. I disagree, and I don't think the Voq Pro needs a significantly faster CPU either. Sure, they'd be nice to have, no question, but do they need them? They do not.

The Voq Pro's software goes a long way to compensate you for the failings and idiosyncrasies of the hardware. The Voq Pro runs Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone, first edition rather than second. But it still provides the crucial personal information management and phone tools that the more recent version offers. To the standard Inbox, Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger comms applications, Sierra has added an MMS client, jMMS Messaging; and it's bundled Westtek's ClearVue Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, image and PDF document readers, ready to cope with email attachments.

Opening up the keyboard or pressing the blue tick button beneath the phone's navigation joystick and between the usual Home, back and call make and break buttons activates the MyVoq utility. It's essentially a smart search system that simultaneously compares what you're typing - numbers or words - against your contacts, notes, Internet Explorer Favourites and the results of previous searches. As you type, MyVoq lists matching database entries on the screen, pruning the list as you enter extra characters to narrow the search. It's a very fast way of getting to the right information without knowing, say, someone's full name. It's also got a built in calculator.

There are flaws: MyVoq doesn't search on all the fields of the contacts database, alas, so you can't search by email address or phone number, for example. And it's not smart enough to check against contacts stored on your SIM card. Nor does it peek into your calendar to help you quickly find that meeting you've got with your boss, but you can't quite remember when it is. It doesn't scan emails either, at least not the ones grabbed via the OS' own Inbox app.

Alongside MyVoq, Sierra has installed VoqMail, its corporate-oriented push-style email service that requires an IMAP4 mail server rather than POP3. The handset ships with the personal version of VoqMail, though some corporate-oriented VoqMail Pro will run for a short period, in a demo mode. VoqMail in either form is geared to deliver email continuously, push-fashion, and to minimise bandwidth at the same time, limiting not only how much you spend in GPRS fees but reducing the how long the radio is running for, thus conserving battery life.

VoqMail neatly tied into MyVoq, which can be used as a quick email composer, but since I was using a generic POP3 account, which VoqMail doesn't support, I couldn't use MyVoq for writing one-line emails either. Despite MyVoq's lack of integration with Inbox, that's nevertheless where you read mail coming in via VoqMail.

Verdict

I tried to like the Voq Pro, but while the handset won my applause for its keyboard, VoqMail and to a lesser extend MyVoq, its clunky, crude look and feel as a phone - it's as if Sierra ran out of time and had to ship the prototype rather than the refined handset it hoped to offer - raised a veritable chorus of disapproval. The lack of a camera doesn't bother me much, but the missing Bluetooth is certainly a deal-breaker.

If you particularly want a phone the offers a keyboard and a candy bar form-factor, the Sony Ericsson P910i, Siemens SK65 and Nokia 6820 offer better-designed handsets and, bought through a mobile phone network, at a much better price. If it's just the form-factor you like, try the Nokia's 6600 or the Orange SPV c500/i-mate SP3 - both compensate for the lack of a QWERTY keypad with Bluetooth.

The Voq Pro is flawed, but it's not a terrible product. The trouble is, as these examples show, it's too little, too late. ®

Sierra Wireless Voq Pro
Rating	60%
Pros	— Good keyboard with separate numeric row; quick, cross-application searching system; bandwidth and power efficient email software
Cons	— Crude, retrograde handset design; no Bluetooth support; no camera; limited memory
Price	£360/$600 without connection
More info	The Voq website

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