THE Shift X9500 is the latest entrant into the ultraportable notebook market from smartphone and personal digital assistant manufacturer HTC.
With its sleek shape and on-the-run connectivity features, the Shift should prove useful for road warriors, although some poor software choices and sluggish specs may annoy power users.
The Shift's best feature is undoubtedly its compact shape.
With its crisp 7in, 800 by 480 resolution touchscreen and weighing a mere 800g, the Shift is an ideal size for mobile workers.
The device gets its name from a sliding QWERTY keyboard that folds down from behind the screen.
In this form, the screen can be tilted forward at 45 degrees to resemble a miniature notebook.
The small size of the keyboard makes typing difficult, but it's still an impressive keyboard.
The clunky sliding keyboard mechanism may make its durability questionable.
The Shift also operates in slate form when the keyboard is folded away.
The sensitive touchscreen reads very well, and most keyboard functions translate well into jabs and swipes with finger or stylus.
A small trackpad on the right of the display, with accompanying right and left mouse-click buttons to the left of the screen, allow easy navigation in tablet form.
The Shift's inability to switch between portrait and landscape orientation may annoy some users.
One of the Shift's standout features is that it runs two operating systems in parallel.
A simple button click seamlessly switches from the primary operating system, Windows Vista Business, to the secondary SnapVUE - essentially a stripped-down version of Windows Mobile 6.
As with most ultraportables, the Shift's modest dimensions deliver limited computing performance.
With its 800MHz Intel A110 processor and just 1GB of DDR2 RAM, it is sluggish running Vista Business.
Vista Business also sucks the battery life right out of the Shift, so you'll be lucky to last two hours on a full charge.
The device is good for basic office tasks and surfing the web.
SnapVUE, on the other hand, works superbly and drains little battery life.
This barebones operating system includes SMS, push email, a calendar, realtime weather updates and a contact list.
To reduce energy usage and heat, SnapVUE also operates while Vista Business is shut down.
The Shift offers 802.11b/g wireless connectivity and HSDPA when a 3G SIM card is inserted.
While using this device, we had some trouble getting it to read our 3G SIM card, but after a simple reset to its factory settings the device quickly recognised and connected to the 3G network.
SPECIFICATIONS
• Price: $1999
• Rating: 7.5/10