LAS VEGAS – Pharos on Tuesday at CES 2009 announced the company's latest unlocked GPS smartphone, the Traveler 137. The Windows Mobile Professional phone is distinguished by a large 3.5-inch, 800x480 touch screen and support for both AT&T and T-Mobile's high-speed 3G networks.
Pharos makes both standalone GPSes and GPS smartphones, and unlike many other manufacturers the company has decided to go it alone by offering unlocked phones that work on AT&T and T-Mobile. Most unlocked phones don't work with T-Mobile's 3G network, which runs on the unusual 1700-MHz band. But the Traveler 137 does, delivering fast Internet speeds on T-Mobile as well as on AT&T.
It actually works better on T-Mobile than on AT&T: with tri-band 1700/1900/2100 3G, it works with all of T-Mobile's and foreign 3G systems, but misses any AT&T 3G cities using the 850-MHz rather than the 1900-MHz band. In those cities, it has to drop to 2G.
The Traveler 137 is a powerful, slab-style Windows Mobile Professional 6.1 handset with a 528-MHz processor and a killer list of features. To hit the Internet, the phone supports both HSDPA 7.2 with HSUPA and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g. (That means its cellular networking is faster than what either AT&T or T-Mobile have on offer today.) The 137 has GPS, of course, along with Bluetooth 2.1, an FM radio, and dual cameras: a 3-megapixel one on the back and a VGA one on the front, for taking pretty self-portraits. The 256 Mbytes of RAM and 512 MB of Flash is supplemented by a MicroSD card slot supporting up to 16 GB memory cards.
The phone's most visible feature, though, is its screen, a 3.5-inch, 800x480 panel. That's the same size as the iPhone's screen, but more than double the resolution. Only the Sony Xperia X1 matches this resolution on a phone, and that phone costs $200 more than the Traveler 137.
Since Pharos is a GPS company, the company focused on including top-notch GPS software on the Traveler 137. The phone's Smart Navigator software downloads maps while the phone has cellular coverage, so you can still use it to navigate when you're out of phone range. The phone will come with U.S. maps for free; Canadian and European maps are available at an extra charge.
"Most navigation solutions for smartphones only work when within a carrier coverage zone," said James Oyang, Pharos' president, in a statement. "We've equipped the Traveler 137 with our hybrid navigation system that follows you wherever you want to go and charges you only when you actually use it." (full Story)
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