Review Date April 23, 2009

Pharos Traveler 127 (Unlocked)

  • Pros

    Solid voice quality and reception. GPS radio works independently of cellular reception.

  • Cons Very slow performance. Buggy software. Poor camera. Difficult to dial phone numbers. SIM card and GPS settings require reconfiguration with every reboot. GPS app doesn't pronounce street names. Clumsy microSD card slot design.
  • Bottom Line

    Given their high up-front cost, unlocked phones are already a tough sell. It's even worse when one has as many shortcomings as Pharos's latest GPS-focused smartphone.

By Jamie Lendino

In the world of consumer electronics, a long list of features is desirable, but ultimately that doesn't matter if the user experience is poor. This truism sums up the Pharos Traveler 127 ($529.95 list), a GPS-focused smartphone whose features fail to gel for lack of a usable design. That's despite its advanced navigation software, colorful UI overlay, and full complement of radios. The Traveler 127 could have been a decent option for the business user hooked into Microsoft's ecosystem at work who wants a smartphone to serve double duty as a GPS unit in the car. But most buyers should pass, at least until Pharos straightens out the user interface and addresses some of the phone's more egregious flaws.

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The Traveler 127 looks the part of a corporate smartphone. It's a rubberized, drab slab with tasteful if nondescript silver accents. The handset measures 4.6 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.1 ounces, and it feels slightly heavy but solid in the hand. On the left-hand side, there's a volume rocker switch, a voice recorder shortcut key, and a covered microSD slot. The top features a power switch that doubles as a keyboard lock, along with a nonstandard 2.5mm headphone jack. The right-hand side contains a button to start Smart Navigator (see below), an unlabeled key that did nothing when I pressed it, and a dual-function Windows Live and Camera button. On the bottom there's a standard mini USB jack for charging and synchronizing with a PC, along with a release switch for the battery cover.

The bright 2.5-inch touch screen supports 320-by-240-pixel resolution and 65,000 colors. A center-mounted trackball lights up along with the rest of the keyboard. It has a pleasing, textured feel that one-ups the trackball on the BlackBerry Curve. Send, Menu, OK, and End buttons flank the trackball. The QWERTY keyboard is similar to what you'd see on a BlackBerry 8800, with roomy keys, a generous space bar, and a pleasant typing resistance. But the keys themselves felt a bit flimsy, and were loose enough to wiggle around in their perches.

One gaffe I noticed right away: You can't dial phone numbers with the keypad. Well, you can, but the keyboard doesn't default to numbers. Instead, typed number keys register as letters—whether you just start typing or you hit the Send key first. To enter numbers you must either bring up the touch-screen keypad—scrunched into the lower left corner of the screen and difficult to use with your fingers—or press the Function key twice to lock the keyboard into number mode. Worse, if the phone shows a dialog box about a missed call or your call history, you can't dial from there; you have to take out the stylus, close the window, and return to the Phone screen before continuing. Memo to Pharos: Before anything else, this is a phone. It needs to be easy to dial.

The Traveler 127 is a quad-band (850/900/1,800/1,900 MHz) GSM and triband (850/1,900/2,100 MHz) HSDPA device. It's unlocked and can use either AT&T or T-Mobile SIM cards in the U.S., and just about anything overseas, without incurring hefty roaming charges—but it costs much more up front. You can also own more than one handset and swap your SIM card between them whenever desired. On first boot-up, the 127 correctly set up my AT&T SIM card on the first try, although I had to sift through numerous trial software dialog boxes and requests to help Microsoft improve the Windows experience. What's more, the phone never remembered that I had already gone through the process, so it asked me to configure the SIM card every time I turned on or rebooted it.

Voice calls sounded bright overall, with too much midrange but plenty of gain. The phone exhibited strong reception; it had no problem pulling in an HSDPA data signal, with three to four bars, in a rural area northwest of Boston that gives some handsets trouble. One downside: There was a disturbing amount of hiss in the background during most (but not all) calls. The handset paired with an Aliph New Jawbone Bluetooth headset without trouble, but the Traveler 127's speakerphone was too weak to use outside and sounded exceedingly tinny. Battery life was poor at just 3 hours 52 minutes.

The Traveler 127 includes a Qualcomm MSM7201-90 processor running at 400 MHz. There's also 137MB of onboard storage and 80MB of total RAM, with 44MB free for user programs. Windows Mobile's old flaws rear their ugly heads here. Usually, the OS took several seconds to redraw dialog boxes or respond to finger touches. Pharos includes a basic finger-friendly UI overlay called MobileMenu, but that means you're dealing with two separate interfaces, depending on the task. MobileMenu is also not part of the cluttered home screen. Consequently, it's not worth the extra CPU overhead and resulting slowness. And MobileMenu has no rhyme or reason to its organization. For example, on the left-hand side of its window there are large icons for Excel Mobile and PowerPoint Mobile, but not for Word, which should have been the priority.

Speaking of which, as a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional phone, the Traveler 127 offers all the usual Microsoft-related niceties. That includes built-in Word and Excel document editing, PowerPoint file viewing, and easy synchronization with Vista PCs as well as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server accounts. There's no upgraded Web browser, so you're stuck with the middling Internet Explorer Mobile, which is fine for rendering WAP pages but little else.

Ostia Smart Navigator, the preloaded GPS app, offers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions and real-time traffic information. The first time I powered it up, I ran into trouble: It began updating its GPS data, which took more than a minute over HSDPA, displaying a frozen spinning wheel the entire time. Then ostia.exe crashed. The second and third times also went poorly, even though I ended the (hung) task each time before trying again. Once I got it going, though (aside from the crashes that still occurred periodically), I found Smart Navigator to be a functional GPS app that offered plenty of route options and useful maps during my in-car tests. Moreover, because it stores map data locally, it works even when there is poor cellular data signal. That's something that most standalone GPS units can do, but few cell phones. One big downside: Ostia lacks text-to-speech conversion—a feature that TeleNav has offered for a while on smartphones.

The handset can play MP3 and WMA tracks as well as display album art. A variety of tracks sounded okay with a paired set of Cardo S-2 Bluetooth headphones, and horrible with the included wired earbuds. WMV and AVI test video files played back unevenly, with frame rates all over the map. Just adjusting the volume would generate a loud beep, pop up a window covering half the video, and then stop the movie and drop back to Windows Media Player—an old Windows Mobile issue other vendors have solved. Wmplayer.exe also crashed once during my video tests.

Pharos includes a 2-megapixel camera for photos and video recording, and a front-mounted 0.3MP (VGA) camera for videoconferencing. There's no LED flash or autofocus capability. Test photos were dim, blurry, and often unusable, because of a low shutter speed and lack of detail. Recorded videos also needed better lighting, but at least they played back smoothly at 320-by-240-pixel resolution.

The microSD slot in the Traveler 127 deserves special mention. It worked with my 8GB Kingston card without a hitch. But its design is infuriating. You can't pop off the plastic cover that's over the slot without also removing the battery cover. Once you do, the stiff card slot cover is still in the way, which makes it tough to insert or remove a card, but it's easy to bump the various hardware buttons elsewhere on the handset—in which case the phone freezes while it slowly loads whatever app you launched by accident. This problem is compounded by how often you'll be swapping the included 2GB card—which contains all the maps for Smart Traveler—with your own media cards, meaning whenever you switch between using the GPS software and listening to music or taking photos.

Aside from its GPS performance, there are few reasons to choose the poorly tuned Pharos Traveler 127 over scores of other unlocked smartphones. Nokia handsets are powerful and integrate well with enterprise networks; the E71 is probably the most comparable, although Nokia's GPS software isn't the greatest. The unlocked HP iPAQ 210 and Palm Treo Pro are solid Windows Mobile devices that are both faster and more powerful, and bracket the Traveler 127's price at $449 and $549, respectively. Again, neither offers the robust GPS software that the Traveler 127 does, although both are better in almost all other ways. Another option if GPS functionality is a must-have: TeleNav's top-notch $10-per-month GPS Navigator software works on a wide range of phones on all the major networks, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Nextel, and Qwest.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 3 hours 52 minutes

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Jamie Lendino
By Jamie Lendino Managing Editor, Consumer Electronics and Mobile


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