O2 Xda Atom Phone Tech Review

The Xda Atom comes to us from the creative labs at O2. This PDA type phone has Windows Mobile 5.1 powering it. This phone follows the quite successful O2 Xda II mini line of phones. The Atom has a black plastic case that is nice and shiny however, it does leave your fingerprints behind. I would say that this is quite annoying but hopefully you will get use to it after awhile. The Xda Atom has many features and some of these we will cover here.

The Atom’s frame is 102mm x 58mm x 18mm making it slightly shorter than the Xda mini design. This shorter design unfortunately did have some cutbacks including using the 2.5mm audio jack, which is not compatible with standard earphones. The other drawback is the miniSD expansion slot that is incompatible with the existing SD memory cards. The 262K-color, 2.7inch QVGA screen is still very crisp and bright. It is great that they did not make the screen smaller and harder to read.

The Atom does support Windows Mobile 5.0, which has soft keys. It does not come with dedicated soft keys so you will need to reconfigure two keys to serve as your left and right buttons. This may get old quickly and perhaps the next version of this PDA phone will fix this problem.

It is hard to find a phone without a camera these days. O2 located the camera on the backside along with a mirror so you can take a picture while you are your friends are in it. The camera is 2-megapixel and comes with a flash. The camera button unfortunately is very easy to press and if you do accidentally hit it; the phone takes 10 seconds to start the camera software. It takes just as long to close the application and suddenly you waste 20 seconds, which may not seem long but if you do it a few times it can be frustrating. You can reconfigure the camera button to a soft key to reduce inadvertent button presses and make this problem go away.