Way, way back in the dim and distant days of yore June, I ran a blog post about the xpPhone, the first ever phone in the world to run on Windows XP. Back then, I said that if it ever actually made it into production, I wanted to have a play with one, whilst of course making it clear I didn’t think it would make it into production. I was wrong. According to Pocketables, the xpPhone will be available soon. And I’m genuinely torn, because there’s a part of me going “ooh, a phone with XP on, this is gonna be sweeeeeeeeeeeet“. Unfortunately, though, there’s another part of me going “ooh, a phone with XP on, that’s never gonna have enough power to run smoothly, and the battery life will be bobbins“. And for a mobile phone, yes, the battery life is bobbins. The manufacturers, ITG, are quoting standby and usage times of 5 days and 12 hours respectively. When the device is billed as a phone, that’s not so great. However, if you look at it as a mini laptop, then yeah, that battery ain’t bad at all. That’s my one overriding problem with the xpPhone, if I’m honest. It doesn’t really know what it is. I admire the fact the manufacturer’s tried to slam together the worlds of mobile phones and laptops, to make a new, hybrid, uber-powerful beastie. I just don’t think they’ve succeeded. And, let’s be honest, if you want a mobile version of Windows, we kind of already have that. It’s called Windows Mobile… However, I’m going to end on a positive, because there’s one thing about the xpPhone that’s made of pure win, and that’s storage. In the mobile world, you’ve got phones like the Palm Pre with 8Gb of memory, and the Nokia N97, with a massive 32Gb of memory. The xpPhone tops them, because you can have both 64Gb of solid-state memory and a 120Gb hard drive in it, at the same time. That’s quite an awful lot of storage space, that is. It’s just a shame that I don’t reckon the rest of the phone can possibly live up to that…The world’s first Windows XP phone WILL go into production!
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