HP iPaq hw6515

Posted 08/26/2005 at 9:22am | by

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Remember the classic Princess phone? You picked it up, pressed some buttons, yapped with a friend until 8:30 p.m., and then hung up to watch Rhoda on TV. It was simple, functional, and downright modest in the way it made a complex technology as effortless to use as a toaster. HP’s Mobile Messenger is a lot like the Princess.

You don’t need to know anything about the quad-band GSM coverage or EDGE network support to get going. Just charge the phone, pop in your wireless provider’s SIM card, and within seconds you’ll be making telephone calls and surfing the web. Setting up email accounts—whether they’re POP3, IMAP, or even Microsoft Exchange servers—is so simple it could happen by accident.

The keypad is very comfortable despite the inexplicable swap of the comma and period keys, and is augmented with a five-way joystick and two reprogrammable application buttons. HP also throws in built-in GPS navigation, which connected quicker and maintained the connection better than the majority of external Bluetooth GPS gizmos we’ve tested (the bundled software gives you one city map free).

There are two expansion slots, so you can add memory to the miniSD slot and slip a Wi-Fi card into the SD slot, as the Mobile Messenger does not have integrated Wi-Fi. Doing so, however, will certainly cut into the already weak battery life, which requires a charge every night with frequent wireless use.

But despite the Mobile Messenger’s superb accomplishments as a communicator, it’s hobbled by some horrible faults. For one thing, the bright 3-inch TFT display is square—square—a design blunder that severely limits the usefulness of third-party Pocket PC applications designed for the traditional 240x320 display. You’ll only be able to see a portion of the application onscreen, and you’ll have to scroll down to see the rest—and that’s if the application will run at all.

Using the pop-up keyboard for stylus data entry takes up half the screen, and, sadly, you can forget about most third-party games.
The built-in 1.3-megapixel camera sounds impressive, but pictures showed severe color artifacting, even in bright sunlight. You can also record video, but the results are on par with that classic Super-8 clip of Bigfoot, and the Mobile Messenger uses H.263 compression instead of a friendlier MPEG-4 varietal.

The Mobile Messenger can also play MP3s, but it’s a poor multitasker in general (we point the finger at Intel’s PXA272 312MHz proc), and chokes at every attempt to listen to music and do anything else at the same time.

The Mobile Messenger could have KO’d the Treo and made you wary of the Blackberry, but its square screen and slow CPU neuter many of its advantages, and some of the Messenger’s extras sour rather than sweeten the experience.
—Logan Decker

+ LOYALTY: A breeze to use, comfy keypad, and excellent GPS tracking.
- ROYALTY: Square screen, awful camera, wheezy processor.

Verdict: 7
URL: www.hp.com