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HTC Tornado - official information and the first live photos

Official Finnish site qtek.fi devoted to the Qtek trademark has published descriptions of Qtek 8300 and Qtek 8310. And they both are variants of a new HTC Tornado platform. So, we decided to give you an opportunity to see live photos and description of the device. A full review will be available on our site later.

A Taiwanese company of HTC is Microsoft's Hardware platform development partner. The company has released the fourth generation of smartphones and communicators already. As for handhelds, the majority of today Pocket PC PDAs are issued from HTC's pen (HP iPaq, Dell Axim, Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX). The company products appear under various trademarks (against ODM/OEM contracts) of operators and other companies, they include T-mobile, Orange, O2, Vodafone, Qtek, I-mate, Dopod and others. Qtek 8300/8310 have a common code name of HTC Tornado, so we'll call the devices by code names not to confuse our readers.

An interesting fact is HTC gives the names of natural disasters to its smartphones. Before "tornado" we saw the "typhoon", the "hurricane", and future smartphones will follow the tradition of "natural" names.

HTC Tornado enters the market several months after HTC Hurricane. The main changes as compared with HTC Hurricane are:

A new CPU TI OMAP 850 instead of TI OMAP 730 (EDGE, data transmission speed reaches 236.8 KB/s)
Integrated Wi-Fi module (optional)
OS Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone

The main innovation the device offers is Wi-Fi. Now, this is one of the first Wi-Fi smartphones, Nokia N91 announced earlier will be launched only after the Tornado. Besides fast Internet, Wi-Fi allows VoIP telephony (especially important for corporate users) and fast music download. For instance, an international T-mobile operator has a well-developed network of Wi-Fi hot-spots besides cellular networks. And these are not all the ways you can use the GSM/Wi-Fi bunch, though VoIP and access to media content are the most evident ones.

The second main innovation is Windows Mobile 5.0. We were pleasantly surprised at the speed considerably grown as compared with the HTC Hurricane platform based on Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone SE.

In all the rest the model copies HTC Hurricane - the same camera, similar construction of the body and the main elements, the same qualitative QVGA screen. And again, a complete review of HTC Tornado's capabilities will be available later, now this is the first glance. But you can refresh the review of HTC Hurricane which is not much different from the last platform.

Review HTC Hurricane

Description:

Class: Windows Mobile smartphone
Form-factor: candy bar
Position in the line: above HTC Hurricane
OS: Windows Mobile 5.0
CPU: Texas Instruments OMAP850 200 MHz
RAM: 64 MB
Flash: 64 MB
Interfaces: miniSD, IrDA (SIR), Bluetooth 1.2, Wi-Fi, USB for recharging and synchronization
GSM 850/900/1800/1900, GPRS, EDGE
Screen: TFT 2.2" with the resolution of 240x320 pixels, 65K
Camera: CMOS 1.3 MP without flash, records video
Battery: removable Li-Ion capacious of 1150 mAh. Battery life announced:
- Talk time - 5 hours
- Standby time - 10.4 days
Dimensions: 107.5x46.2x17.5 mm
Weight: 106 g