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I don’t like the fact that mains power and synchronising is provided by a proprietary connector. The converter from the round-pin mains power adaptor is on the USB sync cable, and E-TEN doesn’t provide a separate mini converter, so you need to carry the USB cable when you want to charge the G500 on the road, or charge it via the cigarette lighter cable from your vehicle.

On the right edge is the mains power switch and a slot for a miniSD card. The stylus is an extending type and expands to 118mm. It is well weighted and fairly fat - one of the best I’ve seen. Its housed is on the bottom back right edge of the casing

E-TEN has chosen a Samsung S3C2440 400 MHz processor, and it didn’t give any trouble during testing. After a hard reset there was 75MB of free storage memory.

E-TEN has gone to town with additional software to augment Windows Mobile 5.0, though unlike Mio the company has not included anything to take advantage of the GPS capability without an antenna.

The Today screen has been augmented in a similar way to the Mio A701, with a choice of either large or small icons to provide access to applications in either one, two, three or an unlimited number of rows.

A battery strength icon has been added to the top row of the Today screen, and on the bottom row are three small shortcut icons. These take you to the wireless manager (GSM and Bluetooth), scenarios chooser (a handset profile switcher), and status indicator for the provided CallFilter software (with which you can create ‘block’ and ‘allow’ call lists and then accept only allowed, hang up all blocked, accept all or accept no incoming calls).

Among the pre-installed additional software not already mentioned is a backup utility and several utilities for editing and viewing photos taken with the built in camera.

I ran the same battery test on the E-TEN G500 as on the Mio A701, and this time got 6 hours 28 minutes of battery life. As already noted, there is hardly anything to choose between the two devices in this respect.

The G500 delivered fairly loud spoken instructions while driving, though it did not put out quite as much volume as the Mio A701.

The vehicle mount was particularly irritating. Its swan-neck section has an easily detachable device cradle. However the neck and windshield connector is in three sections, with the windshield sucker fixed to the swan-neck by a nut rather than being a permanent fitting. On several occasions when removing the mount these parts were separated and I nearly lost the nut under my seat. Had I lost this I’d have been unable to fix the car mount to my windshield and thus unable to use the kit effectively.

In addition to the car mounting kit, the E-TEN G500 comes with a cigarette lighter power cable, stereo headset, slip style protective case, mains power adaptor (proprietary as noted), PC connection cable (proprietary as noted).

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