In terms of design, the P3470 is both compact and stylish, with a matte black finish on the front and back, and glossed sides and edging. It feels quite minimalist, which gives it a touch of class over comparable handsets. The P3470 is quite comfortable to hold in your hand and feels extremely solid. A five-way navigational pad doubles as a scroll wheel, though its lack of responsiveness means users are best off with the traditional control method.
The P3470 lacks a keyboard, instead utilising a variety of input methods including handwriting recognition, a touch QWERTY keyboard and a touch keypad — in addition to the standard Windows Mobile on-screen keyboard. HTC has tweaked the on-screen keyboard and keypad so you don't need to use a stylus to type, but the P3470's recessed display means typing with your fingers is cumbersome at best. The recessed display also means that HTC's TouchFLO interface, seen on the Touch Cruise and Touch Dual, doesn't make an appearance here.
The display itself does an adequate job, but its specifications are far from outstanding and its viewing angle is somewhat mediocre. At this price though, we can't really complain, even if we feel the screen should have been flush with the front of the phone like previous HTC models.
The best feature of the P3470 is undoubtedly its built-in GPS receiver and included CoPilot Live 7 software, which contains Australian maps. The handset managed to maintain a relatively stable signal throughout our test journeys (largely thanks to the SiRF Star III GPS receiver used in most of the portable in-car GPS units on the market). It did tend to drop out at points where there was not a clear view of the sky. We found the scroll wheel very useful for zooming in and out of the detailed maps.
The P3470 runs Windows Mobile 6 software, so it naturally includes mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There is also Windows Live, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, Adobe Acrobat Reader and the usual PIM functions like voice recorder and notes. Unfortunately, the P3470 isn't well equipped in terms of connectivity, failing to offer 3G or Wi-Fi. With only GPRS data speeds available, the P3470 isn't the device if you are looking for mobile Internet connectivity. We can perhaps understand the omission of either 3G or Wi-Fi to keep costs down, but the lack of both puts a big question mark over this handset.
Bluetooth 2.0 (with support for A2DP) and USB 2.0 are both present. Unfortunately, multimedia support is let down by a mini-USB jack instead of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Users can save music files on the 128MB of internal memory, or the included 512MB microSD card.
A 2-megapixel camera is located on the rear, but there is no flash or autofocus. The lack of a flash means night-time photography is out of the question. On the whole, images are about what we'd expect from such a camera with these specifications.
