“An MWg Atom V review?” I hear you wondering. “Who are they then?!” That’s the first thing I thought as well when I received the Atom V for review, together with its sibling, the MWg Zinc II.
I figured it would be another no-name cheap Windows Mobile-based PDA that came with a big feature set, but didn’t actually perform in the real world. Fortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised. Read on for the full MWg Atom V review to see why.
The MWg Atom V is based on Windows Mobile 6.1, and so out the box it looks and acts pretty much like every other Windows Mobile device. There’s no flash user interface like there is with the Samsung Omnia or Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 (two other Windows Mobile devices, each of which has a custom-built UI) – just good old Windows Mobile. This is why I wasn’t expecting all that much.
If you want to know what you get with a standard Windows Mobile device, check out my review of the Toshiba G910’s software. All the software you see on the G910 is also standard on the MWg Atom V apart from the Image to Text app, but given that that didn’t work on the G910, that’s no great loss!
As far as features are concerned, the MWg Atom V’s specs aren’t half bad. It comes with the following key features:
In short, everything you’d need from a smartphone. Indeed, other than a full QWERTY keyboard, the MWg Atom V’s features are almost identical to the Toshiba G910’s that I reviewed earlier, with one crucial difference. Everything works in the MWg Atom V! If you’ve read the Toshiba G910 review I did, you’ll know that I didn’t exactly get on with it.
It was too slow, its touchscreen was virtually unusable, and everything was an effort. Even getting the device to connect to anything was a nightmare, and I never did get it to connect to my WiFi network. In contrast, the Atom V couldn’t have been simpler.
Externally, the Atom V has a minimalist feel to it. There’s no keypad, just a directional key, phone-specific connect and disconnect buttons, and that’s your lot. All the user input comes via the Atom V’s touchscreen.
The phone itself feels rather good in the hand. It has a rubberized back so it doesn’t slip, it fits in your hand comfortably, it’s nice and light at 133g, the screen is a good size (2.8″), yet the whole unit isn’t so big that you feel like a spanner when you put it against your head to make a call.
As far as brick-shaped smartphones go, the Atom V is a good compromise between ergonomics (i.e. not being so small that you can’t actually see the text on the screen) and style (i.e. not being so large that you look you’ve got a small wardrobe attached to your head when you make a call).
The first thing you note about the Atom V is that it’s fast, with the Intel PXA270 520 MHz processor blazing along inside at what feels like four times the speed of the G910. The touchscreen is reasonably responsive, too, with quick recognition of where you want to press, and accuracy that ensures you don’t keep pressing the wrong thing (well, mostly anyway!).
It’s a good job, too, as without a keyboard, the Atom V relies on a tiny virtual keyboard for text entry, which requires you to be super-precise when pressing keys. I tried a similar thing with the G910’s Opera browser, and it wasn’t fun!
Other features of the Atom V work just as well, too. WiFi connection couldn’t have been simpler. I entered my security key, and the Atom V just connected. No complaints, no error messages, no head scratching – it just worked.
The same with the camera. Although it’s only 2.0 megapixels, so the output isn’t that great, it’s got auto focus, the screen renders quickly so the image you see on the screen is the image you’re taking a picture of (always a bonus!), and the camera-specific icons that pop up are clear and obvious.
The camera on the Atom V is OK, but it’s not great. It’s what you’d expect from a run of the mill 2 megapixel camera phone from early 2007. Video, too, is unimpressive. It displays faster than the G910 displayed it, but it’s poor quality and not at all usable. It’s one of those features that’s been added simply to pad out the specification list, rather than implemented in a meaningful way.
The Atom 5 comes with GPS built-in. There’s no GPS software to use with it, other than a simple GPS tracking program (which merely tracks how far you’ve covered), but fortunately this doesn’t matter, as the glorious Google Maps is an extremely impressive mobile mapping tool.
Download, and it’ll get your bearings from the Atom V’s built-in GPS receiver and display your location extremely quickly. You can move around the map with the stylus, zoom in and out, and even view your surrounding from a satellite view, just like on the desktop version. Rendering is quick and effective, and the built-in GPS unit can find the GPS satellites needed for a lock on your location extremely quickly. In short, the GPS abilities of the Atom V are extremely good.
The Atom V comes with the usual array of software that you’d expect from a Windows Mobile device (see my Toshiba G910 review for more details). One thing I will add, though, is that installing new software is a breeze. I installed both Opera Mobile and Google Maps, and they downloaded quickly over WiFi, and installation was a snip.
As far as Web browsing is concerned, the results are less good. Pocket IE does its best, but generally its best is just awful! I downloaded a trial of Opera Mobile, but even that’s not great. The problem is the screen size: it’s only QVGA (320 x 240 pixels), which is a third of the size needed to render correctly most Web sites.
The clarity of the screen isn’t that great, either, as there are only 65,000 colours on show, and the surface of the screen isn’t as clear as it could be.
You can choose to use the phone in portrait or landscape mode, but even in landscape mode, a lot of the screen is still rendered out of view, meaning you have to continually use the stylus to scroll left and right to view the page that’s downloaded.
Web browsing, it seems, is the achilles heel of smartphones. If the phone is too slow, like the G910, or the screen not good enough, like the Atom V, it can quickly become a frustrating experience. If you want the perfect Web browsing smartphone, you need one of the following:
This last point is why the iPhone suits Web browsing so well. You can zoom in and out of a Web page and drag it left and right easily all with your fingers, rather than fumbling around with a stylus.
Overall, I was impressed with the Atom V. It doesn’t go out of its way to impress you – there’s no fancy user interface, and its multimedia features are poor – but as a workhorse PDA cum smartphone it’s extremely effective.
It’s quick and responsive, its GPS works extremely well, and although it’s no use for Web browsing, for day to day office use and personal productivity it’s a good choice, particularly considering you can buy one for £250 with the £50 cashback that Expansys are offering. I’ll give it 7.5/10.
As for who MWg are: they’re the Mobile and Wireless Group, and were spun off from O2 Asia, where they used to make O2’s PDAs. Not such a bad pedigree then!