This is the most comprehensive review of the Dopod U1000 or the HTC U1000 as is now known.  No where can you find a review of a mobile device after 10 months of usage.  It only proves one thing – the HTC U1000 has the future built-in and its features can still beat the pants off the current crop of Pocket PCs. 

So here it is, EAGLESTEVE ON THE U1000, the mother of all reviews, 10 months in the making, and only at The Mobile Hornet:

Dopod U1000, HTC Advantage X7500, X7501, Athena, and T-mobile Ameo are different names given to the same device produced by HTC.  Other than the X7501, which is without the front camera, all devices have identical hardware, although they come with different ROM.

Comparing with the other Pocket PC phones, two things about U1000 set it apart right away: the 8GB microdrive and more importantly a 5 inch VGA screen. 

U1000’s STORAGE
The non-removable 8GB microdrive is in addition to the memory expansion slot for a MiniSDHC card.  Using an adaptor jacket, the MiniSDHC card slot can also read and write to a microSDHC card.  The later has a maximum capacity of 8GB at the time of this writing, giving a total of 16GB.

By installing all software applications in either the device memory or microdrive, and storing only data files on the miniSDHC card, we could change the miniSDHC card without affecting the device operation.  For most of us, the biggest consumers of storage space are the video, picture, and music files.  If these files are kept in the miniSDHC card, then the problem of inadequate storage no longer exist. 

One may ask if microdrive is the best place to store the application programs.  Well, for some programs we really have no choice but to install them into the device memory.  A good example of this is the award wining software keyboard Tengo (and in fact many other software keyboard as well), which could only work when installed in the device memory.  I also tend to install any program that needs to be included in the start-up folder in device memory, as well as today plugins, in order to speed up the soft reset process.  I install all other programs in the microdrive. 

My microdrive contains the cab files of approximately 100 applications, but only about 70 of them have been installed.  With this level of usage, my microdrive still has 6.65GB freespace.  What this tells us is that there should be no reason for anyone to require more storage space if all their data files are kept primarily in the storage card. 

It is interesting to note that recently T-mobile Germany has released a version of Ameo with a 16 GB microdrive.  With less than 10% utilisation, I personally would not find it necessary to have a larger microdrive capacity.

SWAPPING IN AND OUT THE MINISDHC CARD
This is a simple and easy process.  There is no need to shut down the device.  Just slide open the battery cover, give the miniSD card a slight push and it will spring itself out of the slot.  Remove it, and insert in a new card for more storage capacity. 

IS THE MICRODRIVE FAST AND RELIABLE ENOUGH?
How does microdrive perform comparing to the miniSDHC card?  I ran a read and write benchmark test using Sktools on a class 4 miniSDHC cards and microdrive and got the following result:

As you can see, the microdrive is way faster than my class 4 speed miniSDHC card, which by the way is a Toshiba manufactured card made in Japan.  I’ve seen some users posting much higher benchmark for storage cards although never as fast as their microdrive benchmark.

The key weakness of the microdrive is that it comprises moving parts and consumes more battery juice than the storage card.  I feel that HTC should consider replacing this with a SSD in the next upgrade model in order to remove these weaknesses.

In terms of reliability, both my microdrive and miniSDHC cards have had instances where the documents have “disappeared”.  At times, soft resets alone fixed the problem, but in other times, I needed to reformat the media.  In my 10 months of use, both my microdrive and storage card have failed me twice each.  Therefore, I consider both of them reliable enough, although not perfect.   

In all cases, I was able to recover all my lost files very quickly as I have scheduled backup of my microdrive content to miniSDHC card, and my miniSDHC card is periodically copied to my desktop computer.

I personally find that the quickest way to repair the microdrive and miniSDHC card is not to try recover them with tools such as Pocket Mechanics Professional as they are slow and not always able to fix lost clusters and broken chains.  I simply use WM5torage copying utility to copy all my files to the desktop, reformat the microdrive or miniSDHC, and copy the files back after that.  I found that my miniSDHC card gives the best performance when formatted in FAT32 with 32k cluster size, without backing up FAT table.  For the regular miniSD card, the best performance is obtained when formatted in FAT16 with 32k cluster size, without backing up FAT table. 

With a well thought out recovery procedure, I’m always able to recover from a hard reset within 15 minutes if I simply perform a system restore.  If I choose the reinstall each program manually, I am usually able to restore to full working condition within 2.5 hours with all applications registered, PIM data (schedule, tasks, address, emails) restored, and GPRS monitoring data recovered.

Therefore, storage reliability has never been a cause of concern for me in my 10 months of usage.

Coming up next:

THE U1000’s SCREEN AND KEYBOARD