i-mate JAQ

i-mate's is known for selling Windows Mobile phones developed by HTC, just like O2 and other brands, but their latest JAQ is the first of their phones that isn't from HTC. It's made by a relatively new company called Inventec, based out of Taiwan.

Design
The device is rather ugly and odd looking. It looks bulky, thanks to the keypad area being raised up along with the battery compartment on the rear. It seems like those two components were added on to the body of the phone at a later stage. So it definitely looks bulky, but its quite surprisingly light. This also works against it, making it feel very cheap and empty.

The display is a nice, 2.8-inch QVGA TFT capable of 64k colors. The display is quite bright and very readable indoors, but it loses its shine and gets completely washed out in bright sunlight. There is also no light sensor in the device that can automatically adjust the brightness of the screen based on ambient lighting conditions.

The display is also a touch-screen, so you can use your fingernails or the included stylus, the house for which is oddly located below the device on the left side. This positioning also gives the impression that the device was intended to be left-handed. The screen is inaccurate towards the bottom right hand side. In spite of several calibration attempts, it was always off around the bottom right edge.

Above the display, there are three dedicated LED notifications that inform you the status of incoming mail, Bluetooth and the battery level. This is useful when the device is in stand-by mode and the screen is turned off.

Keypad
Below the screen is a full QWERTY keypad for messaging on the phone. There is ample room between two adjacent keys, which can make keyboarding comfortable, but the thin, vertical capsule like shape of the keys is not as comfortable as it looks. There is an Fn key which is required to access the numbers and symbols on the keys. This doesn't act like a shift key, so if you just want to add a comma or an exclamation, you need three key-presses to do so. A double-tap Fn lock would have been a good feature. Also, the numbers on the keypad aren't colored or otherwise marked out in any way, which makes it difficult to find them easily. The numbers and symbols are in a dull orange color. Even the orange backlight doesn't help much.

Above the keypad you have normal phone function keys such as the call and end keys, the two softkeys and the Windows key. Between the two soft keys is the five-way joystick which, due to its raised surrounding, isn't very easy to operate by nudging it with fingers. I found it very irritating to use.