This isn't a phone, it's a computer with a built in phone.

Vista is a poor choice for such a device, it barely runs well on full desktop hardware, never mind on UMPC type phone.

windows vista is a lemon, behold the HTC Shift,

long live XP

if someone posts a decent hack for it to run ANYTHING other than Vista I would buy one.

I agree with Giles. I have always found over-size smartphones just the opposite of smart: They are unhandy to hold to your ear, and if you want to jot down an appointment, you need to take the phone down from your ear while yo do it. Of course, you can have a headset connected to the phone, but then why not have the headset be the phone and have your appointment calender as a separate device.

You put a few too many words on the end of your second paragraph; a simple:

Vista is a poor choice.

...would have been fine. Why narrow it down to phones?

Mine's the one with a S60-based Nokia in the pocket.

Anyone else out there notice that fact that this thing is almost as big as the phones that were around in the 80's.

That was issue one, issue two is to get rid of the Windows OS altogether and put a version of Linux on it. Then the 40GB HDD will have tons of left over space.

Vista runs fine on a 1Ghz with 512Mb as long as you don't have 400 3rd party apps loading at startup - which the majority of OEM laptops/desktops have.

My media centre (Vista Ult with Office 2007) is some archaic relic from about 6 years ago. 512Mb RAM and some crappy Athlon 1500+ (1.3Ghz) and some dirt cheap graphics from about a year ago. (£30). Runs fine. Have Aero on, do my email, word processing and web browsing on it fine. Also do a bit of BitTorrent but mainly use it for Media Centre. Better than any other freeview dedicated box I've come across.

Considering that this device has a better spec than than my media centre box - which runs fine - I'd pretty confident that it's going to run without a problem.

I remember them, but not seen them around for years. What have they been up to?

Jeez, it's 8 inches wide! Who in their right mind would hold that up to their face? Or is it meant to sit in the pocket and a headset be used?

Unless it comes with a backpack, that would DEFINATELY never leave the house. Half a kilogram? Good luck making a call on that for any longer than 45 seconds.

...they've been making trillions of LCD televisions. Good ones, too.

reminds me of those 80's house-brick sized "mobile" phones

I don't think that Jonathan Ive will be losing any sleep over this.

I believe they have been mainly making lcd panels and televisions, although i do occasionally see the odd person (arguably very odd person) with a sharp mobile.

Sharp have obviously been brown-nosing Intel's Exec's to pull out a fast, high-spec phone that looks to be the same size as my old Atari Portfolio...

Let's see John Connor hack an ATM without Vista crashing =)

(Mine's the one at the back with the Atari logo, thanks!)

$1275 USD????

That's more than double an iPhone which most people complain is way overpriced.

And it's friggin' huge man! Who would carry that thing?

I think the Atari Portfolio was smaller than that in 1989 (of course it didn't include a phone.)

What a load. If anything it makes me want an iPhone even more.

It is rumoured that the governor of California can make calls longer than a minute on this phone, so stop whining.

Zack Morris would be proud.

A hard drive and it's power consumption, weight, noise and low reliability?

How 90's.

32G flash is mainstream now on a half inch chip for $70 retail so would add a few tens of dollars to the cost (minus the hard disk). Not fast enough? Put two 16G in parallel -- probably cheaper but more real estate.

you're gonna need it holding that monster up to your ear for any length of time. Headset mandatory to keep from causing physical strain, not to mention the blind spot.

It'd be even funnier to see than the N-gage 'side talkin'"

I didn't think someone would come up with a worse-sized idea of a phone than the iPhone.

Now they didn't just do that, but they slapped on Vista inside. Yes, Vista, instead of (at least) Windows Mobile, which is for ... you know... MOBILE phones.

I already think of my Blackberry Curve of being too large for a mobile standards, but it seems small in comparison to this thing. Bad idea, I think even the "PSP as a phone" idea would look better than this.

And at 1275 USD I might be buying an acutal LAPTOP. One that doesn't have Vista installed, preferably ;)

this isn't a handheld computer like the nokia tablets or the zaurus or even windowsMobiles like the HTC universal.

no, this is a new breed of device, the portable slab, or sub-MID.

nice spec, shame about the weight, size, and the OS!

Another gutsy little CPU and nice device dragged to a screaming halt by a huge bloated OS.

You only have to look at the Eee to see what you can do with a nice light OS, for a fraction of the price. No hard drive required!

Now if only the made an Eee phone....

Looks like they have come up with the zaurus replacement. Sure, it's a communications brick and its running ME2 but that's all going to make it cheaper for me when I replace my SL1000 in a year or two :) Phone, bluetooth, a bigger screen and a lot more powerfull, good stuff. No-one has mentioned battery life though, could be half that bulky brick of a phone is li-ion cells. and it still needs plugged in twice a day if you actually use it as a PDA/PC/mini laptop thing.

cheers