Smartphone Thoughts: The HTC Star Trek: Thin is In

Non-Standard…Everything
In an ideal world, everything that required power would have one common plug. Everything that output audio would have one type of port, and every type of headphones and speakers would have the same matching port. Every device would take the same sort of removable storage. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, so the best we can hope for is common standards that a majority of devices use. On HTC Pocket PCs and Smartphones, that has been a miniUSB port for power/connectivity, and a 3.5mm or 2.5mm jack for headphones. It's easy to get miniUSB power cables – entire industries have sprung up to create retractable USB cables of various types. A small adaptor was all you needed to use your 3.5mm headphones on a device that accepted 2.5mm plugs.

With the HTC Star Trek, they've gone their own way entirely. There's a single port on the device, and it serves the dual purposes of recharging and audio output. You've got a great collection of miniUSB cables and power accessories? You can't use them here. You have a $200 pair of Shure headphones you want to use to listen to music? You can't connect them to this phone. And as Dave Conger pointed out in our recent ThoughtCast about this device, some people like to plug the phone into power and keep using it with a wired headset. That scenario is no longer possible. It is mitigated, however, by Bluetooth headsets and headphone solutions.

Will this new flatUSB (I have no idea what it's called) be standard on all future HTC devices? I don't know the answer to that, but I certainly hope not. Why did HTC switch to this new connector? I can think of two possible reasons, though I have no data to back this up. First, miniUSB is, to my knowledge, unable to be used for audio. In order to get a Windows Mobile phone crammed into such a small frame, odds are good that they had to move from two connector jacks (power, audio) down to one. I haven't seen this flatUSB connector on any other devices yet, but perhaps the entire industry is moving this way. The second reason might be that HTC created a wholly proprietary connector that they will license out to cable and accessory manufacturers. I certainly hope the latter isn't true, but it's certainly possible.

Another issue is the curious location where they put the power/audio jack. It's on the lower left side of the phone. That means you can forget about anyone making an aftermarket cradle for this phone. I find that unfortunate, because I don't like the look of stray cables lying around on my desk. I've used retractable miniUSB cables to solve this problem with other devices that lacked cradles, but that's not yet an option with this phone.


Figure 14: Once you remove the SIM card, you can access the microSD card slot.

The last way this phone breaks with other Windows Mobile Smartphones is the inclusion of a microSD slot (formerly known as Transflash). Most of the PDA/phone enthusiast market is still getting used to ditching their SD cards and using miniSD cards (which are finally reasonable with regards to price and storage size), and here we have yet another new and smaller memory card form. Worse, it's under the SIM card, which means you have to remove the SIM card to get at it. That might not be a problem if the phone had USB 2.0 for fast media synching, because you could leave the microSD card in the phone and sync your music directly to it. It doesn't, however, and only offers up meagre USB 1.1 speeds.

So in summary, you have a consumer-focused, media-centric phone with Windows Media Player buttons on the front and that supports wireless Bluetooth music headphones. It has an extremely slow connection for transferring media, no standard headphone jack, and a memory card that's impossible to get at without disassembling the phone and removing the SIM card. Who planned this?