O2 XDA Guide

O2 XDA Guide

O2 wants to try and cover virtually every niche of its XDA line-up for smartphones and so it is added to the Temp XDA guide for those who want a phone that can also be as a navigation system or the car or when I'm around on foot.

It is no secret that O2 does not actually produce their smartphones, but it relies on outside companies, such as HTC and Asus to build real hardware before adding its own brand. The eagle-eyed of you may have noticed the photo of the guide XDA is actually the rebranded version of the HTC Touch Cruise O2 logo imprinted on the buttons below the screen and the XDA Insignia engraved on the base icon at the top. This package is more than a simple guide phone is also navigation ready, but we'll talk later.

This handset may have been on the market for a while in its previous form as the Touch Cruise, but it's still quite an attractive phone. The resistive touch screen is mounted flush with the rest of the case giving the lines nice and clean and dark graphite on the back and edges look appropriate professional. Add chrome effect buttons below the screen and you have yourself a sophisticated and elegant phone.

A major innovation of the Guide is mechanical scroll wheel that is embedded in the circular D-pad that is located below the screen. This is used to move through the list of items in menus and also to zoom in and out on pictures, maps or Web pages. It works a treat, especially in the web browser and is probably the next best thing to the iPhone multi-touch pinch to zoom.

The guide uses a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM 7225 processor, along with 256 MB of RAM, although this is not the fastest around smartphones that is not exactly slow either, and certainly have not experienced problems with performance, even with several background applications. The phone has 512 MB ROM, or to store applications and files, but O2 also includes a 1 GB microSD card (card slot is located under the battery cover) of meat is still available storage space, which is useful as CoPilot Live 7 navigation software and maps related obviously take up some space. Naturally, the device has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and you also get HSDPA for browsing on the move through the list, the Opera web browser pre-loaded.