i-Mate Ultimates Gallery and Hands-on

Here’s a close-up hands-on gallery of the i-Mate smartphones we saw last night. We got a quick hands-on with them, and to us they feel just as speedy—if not speedier than the HTC phones we’re used to (thanks to the beefy processors they have inside). The D-Pad used for scrolling is more like a nub or a small joystick than a scrollpad, which takes some getting used to. Other than that, the screens are huge, but it’s hard to use a Windows Mobile phone for messaging if there’s no on-board QWERTY keyboard. Only two of the phones have a keyboard, which means the ones that don’t are more for incoming data than outgoing. Do we prefer these to the HTCs? It’s too early to say, but they’re at least on-par.