HP iPaq Voice Messenger

By Craig Simms, CNET.com.au
Apr 17, 2009

Though HP has been rather quiet when it comes to launching new mobile devices last year, its latest pair of handhelds make the iPaq portfolio more complete. The Data Messenger comes with a slide-out QWERTY, while the Voice Messenger replaces the earlier 512 Voice Messenger with a dual-letter keyboard.

Design And Features

With a shiny deep blue fascia color and silver sides and back, the iPaq Voice Messenger is certainly a corporate phone.

Its dual-QWERTY keyboard is augmented by two capacitive touch buttons under the screen, which unfortunately sometimes react when pressing the screen above them, misleading the user into thinking they might have a touchscreen phone. They are also incredibly easy to accidentally touch and react when you put your ear against the device, causing unwanted selections to be made. Considering it's a phone, this is going to happen quite a bit. We managed to mute a call entirely by ear, literally.

For navigation, HP uses a small optical sensor in the middle of the silver button under the screen. Navigation can be performed by swiping your thumb up, down, left or right, and selections made by pressing the silver button down. Eventually you get used to this system, though it's nowhere near as responsive or accurate as say, Nokia's four-way pad, BlackBerry's trackball or Apple's touchscreen, and often misses swipes completely.

The keyboard itself is a subtle wave shape (but too subtle to touch-type) that becomes almost flat near the bottom. As a result you'll find yourself looking at the keypad more than the screen for accurate typing.

Buttons and ports around the sides are minimal, with a lock button, volume control and a strangely unmarked voice command button on the left, camera button, micro USB and 2.5mm headphone jack on the right, and a speaker mute switch on the top.

Its 2.4-inch, LED backlit 320 x 240 screen is adequate, and the phone slips easily into your pocket, which is, sadly, one of the best things we can say about the iPaq Voice Messenger.

It has a 3.1-megapixel camera with a flash, but despite user-selectable white balance, sharpness, contrast ratio, brightness options and setting the quality to highest, the photos taken were horrible and showed a tendency to over-expose and completely blow out whites.

There are some bizarre interface choices that have arisen as a result of HP trying to cram its own services into this device. You can't, for example, delete a photo through the "My Photos" gallery accessed on the home screen because HP's Snapfish and Enhance Document applications appear instead. To delete a photo, you'll have to go back to the home screen, press Start, Media, then Pictures and Videos, press the right capacitive button and select delete.

What could have been a two-button press process becomes four and a whole lot of thumb swiping. While you can delete a photo after you've taken it, this option appears and disappears two seconds after the event, barely giving you time to even register the photo.

Voice commands are offered by Cyberon Voice Commander, which by and large seems to be OK with the Australian accent — until you mention the number four, where it either ignores you completely, or inserts a zero. Even with voice training the phone kept making the same mistake until we spoke into it with an American accent, and, vexingly, it worked fine.

It also features GPS access through Google Maps, however, there is no turn-by-turn feature included. Otherwise it's Windows Mobile 6.1, with all the features and foibles within.

Performance

The iPaq uses a Qualcomm MSM7201A chipset with an ARM1136EJ-S core at 582MHz for applications, and an ARM9 core at 256MHz for the radio stack. QDSP4000 and QDSP5000 chips are used for multimedia and graphics. For storage it features 128MB of SDRAM and a 256MB flash ROM, not to mention a microSD slot should you wish to push your storage higher, supporting cards up to 8GB.

From its off state, start-up time was 34 seconds, with around another 20 seconds for the interface to become responsive, after which we didn't notice any huge lag issues. Through anecdotal light use, the 1,206mAh battery lasted three days.

While call quality and speakerphone were acceptable, the phone itself got uncomfortably warm when calling.

It's worth noting that the iPaq Voice Messenger does not support UMTS 850, effectively making it incompatible with Telstra's Next G service. It is otherwise quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900MHz), tri-band UMTS (900/1900/2100MHz), and HSPA 3.6/7.2Mbps compatible.

Conclusion

The iPaq Voice Messenger is at best, mediocre. There's nothing here that HTC, BlackBerry or Apple don't already do better, and unless your company already has a great HP contract, it's hard to recommend.

Tags: Compaq iPAQ, RIM BlackBerry, Hewlett-Packard Co., Keyboard, UMTS

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