When Phones Were Laptops HTC Universal 2005

Sponsored by Surfshark. In 2026, shrinking a laptop to handheld size requires a folding phone, some kind of stand, a keyboard, and a mouse. At least $2,000 worth of gear carried in a minimum of two pockets. 20 years ago, as with many things, the pocket laptop was much simpler, only better and worse. It's 2005, and a company that would come to be known for its high-tech computers just dropped the most ambitious one of its time. This is the HTC Universal. If that name doesn't ring a bell, maybe you knew it by another one. The O2 XDA Exec, the iMate Jazz Jar, or the T-Mobile MDA Pro. And that last variant is what I stumbled upon in my archives when filming the prior episode of this series. Thanks again to Charles Gowen for the donation. But I really couldn't cover it because as a German market device, it shipped with a quartz keyboard that I'm just terrible at typing on. But I couldn't get the damn thing out of my head. I was like obsessed with it. So when I saw an eBay listing for Vodafone's version of the HTC Universal, I went for it. And I've spent the last week toting it around town, reliving the Windows Mobile life 20 years later. We've talked a lot about how the mid-aughts was an insane period for mobile phones, and the Universal blended the most ambitious elements of the time, 3G, a full keyboard, a double hinge, a big display, and a Windows operating system into a single kind of super insane smartphone. I'm pretty sure I can trace my current pocket laptop obsession back to devices just like this, which came on the scene back when I was still crisscrossing my college campus, my backpack straining under the weight of a desktop replacement PC that weighed almost 10 pounds. The idea of condensing that capability into a 10-ounce portable that fit into a pocket, well, it was compelling, not just for its obvious orthopedic benefits, but because it made me feel like the future I'd been awaiting for a lifetime's worth of Star Trek oversaturation was finally around the corner. Of course, it really wasn't, in part because the appetite was still limited for such an expensive phone, and partly because we hadn't yet figured out a proper user interface, but let's talk about what's here before we tackle what isn't. HTC recognized that to be both phone and PC, the Universal needed a one-handed mode. You know, you couldn't expect a customer to crack open a clamshell as big as this just to check a text message, so it used one of my favorite things, a twist and flip hinge, similar to the one on Samsung's A600 that allowed the phone to be closed with the 3.6-inch display facing outward to produce a semblance of the large-screen smartphone we all now know and, you know, tolerate. It was a touchscreen, but in this time before the LG Prada and original iPhone, it used resistive technology, sensitive to pressure, not capacitance, and so it worked best with the included stylus. This was also the era of buttons, and with the exception of BlackBerry, nobody loved buttons more than HTC. They're strewn all across the enclosure, 13 of them on the sides and face, addressing everything from calling to camera, SMS to soft reset, and none of them is really great. I mean, you accidentally hit the ones on the side all the time, not all of them wake the device up, and the power button is in exactly the wrong place, down on the bottom. But you know, it was early. We were still figuring it out, and it was often easier to get used to the idiosyncrasies of these keys than it was to use that resistive touchscreen. And that was also true of the 62 buttons you found when you opened it up and set it down on its little rubber footies. HTC crushed it with this keyboard. The buttons are big and slightly pillowy, which helps delineate each one despite the lack of any separation, and the switches have a clicky tactility that I, of course, appreciate. And of course, it gives you all the shortcuts, modifiers, and alternate characters you could ask for on a machine that offered the entire Microsoft Office mobile suite. So here's the part where I tell you I typed this whole script on the Universal, right? Mm, nope. As much as I love the concept of clacking out a few thousand words in laptop mode, the reality is that at this size, the most comfortable way to use this thing is to type with your thumbs. Even at the time, the surging popularity of BlackBerrys and Trios was making this clear. You just have more space to work with when there are only two fingers to worry about instead of 10. And HTC's future phones would reflect this. The QWERTY smartphones that succeeded the Universal were almost all side-sliding jobs meant to be used in the hand rather than on a desk, which, from one point of view, is a shame because I think Windows Mobile is a lot easier to deal with in a desktop context. With the phone on a table, its stereo speakers pointed at me, its LEDs blinking with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals, its little webcam pointed at my face in case I wanna make a video call, rare even on laptops at the time, my expectations are properly set. My brain looks at this and says, oh, computer. And in 2005, with four out of five computers running Microsoft software, Windows was the norm. I was lost without a Start menu. I'll be honest, I don't miss this particular era of Windows Mobile, though. Even running a capable Intel chipset backed up by a then-typical 64 megs of RAM, the Pocket PC experience was characterized by a lot of waiting for the OS to catch up with what you wanted to do. Now, to be completely fair to the phone, the Model I eBayed has been upgraded from Windows Mobile 5 to version 6.1, and it sports an SD card absolutely loaded with custom software, which I'll show you in a second. I bet that slowed things down a touch. And to make sure I wasn't bringing my modern biases to the table, I dove into some reviews from the period. My friend Judy Stanford, writing for The Gadgeteer, reported that the phone never felt particularly sluggish, and Gavin's Gadgets has an epic blog post about using it as a PC replacement for two weeks. Again, this is in 2005. You really could do so much with these things. But I also speak from experience. In 2006, and again in 2008, I dipped my toe into the Windows Mobile waters with the HTC Apache and HTC Titan, and I never made it to a full year with either one. They were just too slow, too clunky, compared to the snappier and more intuitive experiences available from Palm and BlackBerry. Oh, and no matter how many of these kitschy filters you could throw on, or how massive the manufacturers made their megapixel branding, pocket PC cameras always let me down. Still, I didn't want to put the Universal back into the archives without correcting the frustrating failure of my i930 video. I needed to install some third-party apps. As I mentioned, the phone came with quite a few, and I plumbed my college-era smartphone archives to add some more via the SD card. Aren't standards great? Now, plenty of this stuff will seem pedestrian today, because it addresses functionality like GPS navigation or system backups that modern phones offer out of the box. But it's a good reminder of how powerful it was to have a third-party app ecosystem, even before we called them apps. When Microsoft Office didn't want to open an Excel file, a third-party program called Foxit Reader opened the PDF version. When I wanted to add a Google search bar to the Today screen, I could just do that. I brushed up on my Borg implant irritation treatments with something called the Australian Medicines Handbook, and I can barely describe what an epic relief it is to game on a vintage phone. I'm sure you had to shell out VUCU bucks for some of them. This hand-marked edition of Monopoly apparently went for 30 bucks at the time. But once you paid, you just played. No loot boxes or pop-up ads to corrupt your experience. Man, I miss this. And if you didn't want to spend the money, hey, there was always Dope Wars. You see, Motorola i930, this is all I wanted. In a time before mobile tech became a commodity, when many of us were still almost in awe of the humble dumb phone's ability to connect us to anyone we cared about at any time, the HTC Universal was an even bolder promise, that through 3G and a familiar form factor, it could connect us to the entire internet while looking simultaneously futuristic and somehow important, commanding a BlackBerry-like corpo respect, but with about a million more features. The Universal engendered the kind of loyalty few devices do. Channel viewer Jonathan told me he used his for five years, even making a habit of using remote desktop to control his home computer through it. And its place in geek history was cemented when six years after release, somebody ported Android to it, as was the style at the time. HTC's mobile division as we knew it is no more, having been largely absorbed into Google's Pixel unit. And Windows Mobile was replaced by the ill-fated Windows Phone, survived today only by a handful of Android launchers aping its excellent aesthetic. But both the phone and the operating system stand as monuments to a time when buttons were real. The future of mobile seemed like an extension of the PC instead of vice versa, and phones were fun. I used to think VPNs were only for people doing shady stuff online, until I started spending over 100 days a year on the road. This video is sponsored by Surfshark, which I use to keep my browsing between me and the site I'm visiting. Why does that matter? Well, it lets me keep watching my favorite shows even when I'm out of the country. It lets me shop in the currencies I'm used to, bank the same way I always do, and for the same selection of content I'm used to seeing. And when I travel to countries that restrict access to certain sites, like the ones I need to do my job, Surfshark keeps me in business. In short, it's a tunnel to the internet I need that follows me wherever my travels take me. Secure your privacy with Surfshark, and get an extra four months at the link in the description. Thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. Hey friends, if you enjoyed this one, go back and check out a different flavor of Windows Mobile with my exploration of the i930, a smartphone that doesn't look smart and honestly doesn't much act like it either. And if the hinge on the Universal compelled you, you can see how it was put to use on the first camera phone I ever had in the episode showcasing the Samsung A600. There are over 20 installments of When Phones Were Fun on the buffer, with more coming soon. No manufacturer I covered here had copy approval rights or editorial input into the content of this video. The lone sponsor is Surfshark. Until next time, from Michael Fisher, Captain Two Phones on social, thanks for watching, and stay mobile, my friends.