As fabulous as it is, you didn’t really think the iPhone was going to have the super-smart-phone/ portable-entertainment-device/ Web-surfer market all to itself, did you? Enter HTC’s Mogul, which can do nearly everything the iPhone can do. Sure, it lacks the cool commercials and touch-screen gee-whizziness, but it offers much more truly useful functionality for people who work for a living.
The Mogul has Wi-Fi, too, but unlike the iPhone, which slows to a crawl when not in a Wi-Fi hotspot, the Mogul, which rides on Sprint’s blazing EV-DO cell network, is fast everywhere. So instead of waiting 20 seconds to be able to start reading CNN.com, you’ll wait six. Plus, typing Web addresses, e-mail replies and notes to self is much simpler on the Mogul’s slide-out qwerty keyboard than on the iPhone’s snazzy but awkward onscreen version. If anything, the Mogul has too many buttons compared to Apple’s model of minimalism, but your perfunctory side will appreciate the dedicated doodads for tasks like send and end for phone calls.
Because it’s outfitted with Windows Mobile 6, the Mogul also lets you search your inbox by typing just the first few letters of the subject or sender’s name. You can even edit and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, as opposed to merely viewing them on Steve Jobs’s fancy new toy.
Not that the Mogul doesn’t have a fun side. Like the iPhone, it comes with a 2-MP camera and music player. You can use the Mogul with a stereo Bluetooth headset for rocking out and gabbing wirelessly. And although it doesn’t work with iTunes, you can wirelessly download 99-cent songs from the voluminous Sprint Music Store. Unfortunately, you can’t exit the Sprint software to check your calendar or surf the Web while listening. (A major lapse — we know, what were they thinking?)
But no device is perfect, not even the iPhone. And while Apple’s work in progress may be the device you waited hours on line
for, the faster and rather more practical HTC Mogul could be the one that you find yourself using more often.
