Lucky me, and thanks to the internet, I got my hands on a variant of the Hermes called SoftBank X01HT at the bargain price of RM1900, together with 1GB of microSD card! SoftBank actually is a telecom carrier in Japan very much like O2 or Orange in the UK who buys HTC Hermes and re-brands it as the X01HT.
If you want a detailed review on the Hermes, you can head to here. This entry is just for me to roughly review my unit as I received it from my source. The unit comes with everything intact, in a box and complete with all SoftBank's bundled accessories. It is black in color, and as expected the QWERTY keypad has Japanese characters on them.
If you look at the Today screen in the above picture, everything is in English instead of Japanese. The ROM has been flashed to the latest cooked Windows Mobile 6.0 LVSW dated 2007-06-16. To date, none of the Hermes variants has WM6 pre-installed. So far only Dopod has announced a future upgrade to WM6 for their 838 Pro devices and that is scheduled to happen in July 2007. Hopefully the ROM will be compatible across the Hermes variants so we can have a properly supported WM6 by then.
The Hermes is truly a powerful device. It is powered by a 400 MHz SAMSUNG ARM processor with 128MB of ROM and 64MB of RAM built in. It has all kinds of connectivity options you can ever hope for in Malaysia. It supports quad-band GSM, GPRS, EDGE, tri-band UMTS and HSDPA. Simply put this devices supports all 2G to 3.5G standards over here. Apart from these, it also supports 802.11b/g WiFi standards, and of course, Bluetooth 2.0 albeit without EDR.
The Hermes is equipped with a 1.9MP camera at the back of the phone, and one CMOS camera in front for 3G video calls. The 1.9MP camera is way better than my O2 Mini's 1.3MP. The camera has some sort of lever to switch between normal and macro mode. An LED flash is available for better shots in low-light area.
The Hermes has a 2.8" touchscreen display, a sliding QWERTY keypad, a jog-dial and navigation buttons so there are many different ways to interface with the device. On the downside though, there is no standard 3.5" audio jack available, only a proprietary USB jack that works for data transfer and also for the bundled headset. But fret not; this baby supports A2DP and AVRCP which means it supports stereo Bluetooth headsets. I'm getting a Motorola S705 SoundPilot to pair with the X01HT so that may be in another blog entry XD. The 2.8" screen and stereo Bluetooth headset will instantly turn the Hermes into a portable media player.
The battery included is Li-Ion with a capacity of 1300mAh.
With all these features, the Hermes is future-proof for at least the next 2 years. There is already a successor called HTC Kaiser that is set to retail in August 2007 but for now, the Hermes is the perfect device for me. It is way better than even the latest HTC Touch, iPhone and the like in terms of features and price, and packs a punch in such a small form factor. If you are interested in getting one, send me a message via email or IM and I will give you the contact information of the seller.
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