HTC Athena: The sane man's UMPC?

By Rory Reid on 27 December 2006, 10:45am

Crave can't wait for CES 2007. There will be hustle, bustle, gambling, the international porn-star awards (which take place next door), oh and shed-loads of technology. One of the things we're most excited about seeing is the HTC Athena -- or X7500 if you're a complete nerdwad.

The Athena is some sort of mobile phone-cum-laptop which incorporates a 3.5-inch display and runs Windows Mobile Pocket PC Professional Edition. The qwerty keyboard looks small, but it doesn't appear as unusable as the keyboard on the Toshiba Libretto. Interestingly it's detachable so you can choose whether to take it with you or leave it behind. Various blogs on the Internet are speculating it will feature tri-band GSM/GPRS connectivity, 802.11b/g WiFi, 64MB of RAM, a 2-megapixel camera, SD card support and a 400MHz processor. Not bad if it turns out to be true.

It's yet to be officially announced (these shots were leaked by Polish Web site pdaclub.pl) but we couldn't help but bring you tentative details of what could turn out to be an awesome piece of kit. We'll be pestering HTC at CES for a full hands on. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be as big a disappointment as the UMPC. -RR