UMPCs (ultra mobile PCs) have been around for 2 years or so in the relative mainstream. Long enough that we've seen several very different designs from the tiny OQO to the sleek slider Sony Vaio UX to those that resemble traditional handhelds sans keyboard like the Raon Vega. But really, there have been 3 major design camps: the pure slate like the Samsung Q1 Ultra, the extremely compact model with a keyboard that slides down from the bottom (OQO, Sony Vaio UX and others) and more recently the miniature notebook (Fujitsu U810 and Vye). HTC, perhaps the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile phones has entered the game late with a design that's truly their own. In fact, the HTC Shift looks a lot like a giant HTC Tilt Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone rather than a notebook or UMPC. Cool.

The Tilt with its slide out-and-up display is extremely popular and makes even better sense on a Vista ultraportable. The Shift can be used as a slate, as a flat slide-out keyboard device and in a conventional notebook position with the display upright. UMPCs attempt to bridge the gap between the mobility of a PDA and the power of a notebook, and the Shift comes closer than most thanks to its relatively large display and borderline touch-typable keyboard. The Shift's codename is "Clio", perhaps paying homage the Vadem Clio, a unique swivel-designed Windows CE HPC from years ago. The GSM unlocked model is the CLIO110 and the CDMA version is the CLIO200.

Design

You’d be hard-pressed to find a UMPC that is as cleanly designed as the HTC Shift. Taking into account the mechanics with the tilt + slide mechanism, they did a wonderful job. There’s not a huge amount of ports or buttons or switches on it, and that’s a good thing. On the right side, you have the HTC Communications Manager button, the screen resolution adjustment button, the trackpad, right speaker, and finally fingerprint reader. Moving to the left side, you have the right and left mouse click buttons, left speaker, and below that is the SnapVue/Vista button to switch between the two operating systems.

As we travel around the unit, we see the Power/Hold switch, USB port, and charging port. On the back, you’ll only find the VGA out port which is perfectly placed. All we have on the left side is the 3.5mm headset jack and nothing on the front side of the unit.

 Touch screen and keyboard

The Shift looks like a high quality, sexy and modern device. The casing is plastic, but it doesn't look cheap, and there's a metal bezel surrounding the display. The slider hinge is stiff with a definite lock-in-place feel when you close the unit-- much firmer than HTC's slider phones. The battery mounts at the bottom and there are plastic feet on the bottom. Air vents live at the back and sides and when the fan comes on, it blows rearward. The fan comes on when the unit works hard at playing video or other demanding tasks. At full blast, the fan is easily audible and we suggest not blocking the air vents by laying it on a bed for long periods of time if you object to fan noise.

The power slider (with lock position to avoid accidental power on), full size SD card slot and the lone USB 2.0 port. HTC includes a USB dongle that plugs into the Shift's USB port and expands it to 3 USB ports plus an RJ45 Ethernet jack. The 3.5mm stereo headphone jack is on the left side along with the stylus (hard to get out small telescoping affair) and the VGA port is on the rear edge. The Shift's surprisingly good and loud stereo speakers live behind narrow grills that flank the display and there's a built-in mic for voice command under Vista, VoIP calls and etc. The VGA web cam lives at the top left edge of the display rather than at the center as with most notebooks and UMPCs. We found it rather off-putting to sit off to the left while video conferencing in Skype and Skype video calls really bogs down UMPCs running Vista (and even XP). The biometric fingerprint scanner lives near the lower right corner of the display.

To the left of the display are two stacked buttons that handle mouse right and left clicks. On the left there's a mini trackpad that measures 3/4" x 3/4" instead of the usual annoying eraser stick pointer or other lamentable pointing device. Even as a leftie who'd prefer the trackpad on the left side, I found the trackpad, which HTC calls a "microPad" pleasurable to use, though a thumb is too fat and one of the other digits is best used (fat fingered folk may have trouble with the microPad as a result). Of course, the Shift has a touch screen that's best described as soft touch, making it very finger friendly. So you need not use the mouse apparatus at all.

On the US Sprint version only, the case is permanently attached and "should not be removed" according to HTC. It's actually affixed to the bottom rear edge by 3 really tiny-headed TORX screws and HTC tells us this is to pass FCC certification. Who'd have thought a soft suede case could effectively reduce EVDO airwave pollution? The case is brown soft leather on the outside and gray with a suede texture on the inside. The case is nice but annoying at times as you always have to fold it out of the way to use the unit.

The touch screen on very small UMPCs like the Sony Vaio UX and Fujitsu U810 are hard to use with fingers because the screen is so small and the resolution so high (targets like links are super-tiny). But the Shift's large display and soft-touch screen make finger navigation a breeze, even at 1024 x 600. HTC scores big usability points here. If you want a finger-friendly UMPC, this is it. If you're a hardcore inker who takes a lot of handwritten notes, then touch screens' tendency to vector (play connect the dots between your stylus and palm or knuckle resting on the display) will annoy. To reduce vectoring on touch screen tablet PCs and UMPCs, it helps to switch the display to portrait orientation, but the the Shift is one of the few we've seen that does not support screen rotation-- it's landscape only (HTC didn't see a need for portrait mode, so they didn't include support for it).

The display is very bright, so bright that the highest setting is just too bright. It's also sharp, though not as sharp as the Vaio UX, OQO model 02 or the U810-- but that's not a completely fair comparison since those machines have much higher pixel densities (they cram more pixels into a smaller space which increases sharpness). The Shift's display is fine at 1024 x 600 and more useful than 800 x 480. For older eyes, we found that increasing the font dpi setting in Vista to 110% made for very readable text with no eye fatigue. For those with poor vision, the 800 x 480 resolution should be quite easy to read. The display surface is matte and the included screen protector adds a bit of gloss but in no way interferes with screen response.

Also scoring big usability points is the excellent keyboard-- the best we've used on a UMPC. If your fingers aren't super-sized, with a little practice you'll actually be able to touch type. The keys are notebook style medium-travel as compared to the Vaio UX's no travel/no tactile feel thumb board and the Fujitsu U810's more squishy long travel keys (that are much smaller since the U810 is quite a bit smaller overall). This is a standard notebook keyboard layout with a number row up top with embedded Fn keys (F1-F10), arrow keys at the bottom right (hold down Fn to turn them into page up/down, home and end), dual standard shift keys, Crl, Alt, Windows Start Menu and a normal size (relatively speaking) space bar. Note that the import version has a UK layout, with a few symbols in different locations from a US keyboard. Be sure to select "UK keyboard" in the initial Vista setup if you've purchased the import GSM/3G version or some symbol keystrokes won't match the key labels (go to the Regional control panel if you've accidentally selected the US keyboard in setup to switch to UK keyboard).

Performance

This isn't the section where you get all jazzed up about UMPCs. They're small, really small-- too small for standard current notebook CPUs. Even the super-thin MacBook Air has lots of room to work with compared to these guys. Hence the HTC Shift runs on the Intel Stealy A110 processor at 800MHz. You'll find that CPU in the Samsung Q1 Ultra, Fujitsu U810 and other current UMPCs. In its favor, the A110 generally outperforms the VIA processor used in current competing UMPCs, though it's outclassed by the Sony Vaio UX3xx and 4xx series which run more powerful Intel CPUs (more so the UX4xx series). The upcoming Intel Atom CPU for mobile devices focuses on low power consumption and longer runtimes-- we don't expect it to run circles around Stealy. 800MHz isn't that bad-- you may well have a notebook that's a few years old with a CPU in that ballpark, and Windows XP, Linux and Mac OSX can manage just fine. The trouble is Vista, an OS that's hungrier than a lone piranha in a pool. And there is no downgrade to Windows XP, for those of you who'll take speed over the latest OS. Some of the drivers are fairly proprietary, so it won't be easy to install XP or XP Tablet Edition yourself and cobble together downloadable drivers.

But the good news is that Vista Business Edition (the only OS version available bundled with the Shift) runs tolerably well. HTC's engineers worked some good mojo here and have made a few optimizations that really make a difference. If you intend to use the Shift as a highly mobile web, email, Office document and occasional (non-HD) video playback machine, it's fine. It also makes a good music player and can handle Windows Media player cranking tunes while you're busy in Word, email and a web browser. We don't suggest running more than 3 heavy titles at once (say Photoshop, Word and a web browser). Given the low resolution (relative to a standard notebook or desktop), you probably won't want to use it for serious movie making, image editing and the like. It's a mobile office, not a portable powerhouse.

The Shift has 1 gig of DDR2 400MHz RAM in the form of a microDIMM. This gives us hope that the machine can be upgraded to a more Vista-friendly 2 gigs (with 1 gig, there's only about 300 megs free with no other apps running). But the machine doesn't scream "take me apart"-- beyond warranty issues, it's not an easy machine to take apart. HTC says it is possible but they have no plans to offer a 2 gig upgrade and taking the machine apart will indeed void the warranty.

The hard drive is a 40 gig 1.8" model spinning at 4200 RPM (the same kind of drive is used in hard drive based MP3 players like the iPod 5G and Zune). These aren't fast drives, but it performs well in the Shift so we aren't complaining. From the factory, there's 21 gigs of free space. Vista takes up a good deal of space and there's a recovery partition which is a good idea since there's no optical drive for restoring from a disc. Given the tight space, you'll probably want to use a USB flash drive or fast SD card to hold movies for playback on the commute or flight. There is no SSD drive option, but the standard drive performs well enough and the machine is already pricey-- a 64 gig flash drive could easily raise the price another $1,000.

The Shift's Windows Experience Score:

CPU: 2.1
RAM: 4.5
Vista graphics for Aero: 3.8
Gaming graphics: 2.7
disk: 3.8

Software

There's absolutely no bloatware-- thank you, HTC! The Shift comes with a clean install of Vista Business Edition, VitaKey biometric security software, a trial of Trend Micro Antivirus, HTC's Shift Control Center (the oddly named application "ShagControl.exe") and drivers for the hardware that comprised the machine. Shift Control Center manages the WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM radio connections, has sliders for brightness and volume, flight mode, and advanced settings where you can reboot Windows Mobile (SnapVUE). Note that the only way to completely wipe out SnapVUE is to use the Clear Storage application in SnapVUE settings. Trend Micro is the closest thing to bloatware, but some sort of anti-virus is necessary. For less brainy machines like the HTC, we prefer the lightweight AVG, which is available in a free edition.

The nifty piece of software on the Shift is Origami Experience 2.0. Those of you who use Windows tablets and UMPCs are likely familiar with the finger-friendly Origami with its large icons and media controls. But the Shift is the first device to ship with the 2.0 version (as of this writing you can't even download it to upgrade a 1.0 machine). Version 2.0 adds a lovely information desktop with widgets, called Origami Now and features a web browser (customized IE) that supports scrolling by dragging the page and other cool stuff. UMPC users who are into Origami will likely love this new version.

Battery

Most UMPCs battery life rivals a full-sized notebook, which is to say not great at 2 hours. The Shift's 2700mAh 12v Lithium Ion battery lasts 2 hours on a charge in Vista according to HTC. In our tests with either WiFi or the WAN radio on, Bluetooth off, power savings set to "Balanced" and the screen set to half brightness, we averaged 2 to 2.5 hours when surfing the web with frequent page turns, working with Office documents and email. We got about 1.7 hours of iTunes video playback (video on an SD card). Standard spare batteries are available for separate purchase, and HTC tells us they currently have no plans to offer an extended battery (given the device's design, we can't imagine how they'd make one). Battery life in SnapVUE is about 2 days with push email on. This assumes vanilla use of SnapVUE and not hacked Windows Mobile and use of a 3rd party web browser, video player and the like for hours at a time.

Conclusion

Certainly one of the best UMPCs we've seen to date with a large display and usable keyboard. Ultra-mobile computers are highly personal devices, so we can't say the Shift is for you: if you want a near notebook replacement with a display that's easy on the eyes, a relatively good typing experience and wide area networking via cellular then the HTC is a good fit. If you want something that will fit in an oversized pocket rather than a notebook substitute, consider the significantly smaller OQO model 02 or Sony Vaio UX (or the Fujitsu U810 as a compromise between the two). We say that the HTC Shift has the best usability of any UMPC thanks to its very readable display, finger-friendliness and top-notch keyboard. The integrated high speed wide area networking is perfect for those whose travels extend beyond hotspots and home/work networks and there's WiFi for home/work/Starbucks. Bluetooth 2.0 means you can use Bluetooth mice, stereo headsets and more so you need not carry the USB hub with you.