HP iPAQ hw6965

The HP iPAQ hw6965 is HP’s option in the QWERTY handheld market that simply represents the BlackBerrys and the Treos. As a feature addition, the latest in the hw6900 series integrates a GPS navigation unit in a feature packed phone that probably won’t ever fall short of connectivity options. Clearly targeted at corporate users, the phone also packs in a few multimedia features to mix business with pleasure—and help you find your way if you ever get lost.

Design
The hw6965 is quite wide and bulky, but existing iPAQ users aren’t used to extremely streamlined, slim handheld drives anyway. It’s like the E61, but its bulkier and heavier. The BlackBerry Pearl has really spoilt us—now we keep comparing all email phones to it. The hw6965 is not really pocketable, and that’s why they’ve provided a belt holder with it. It comes with a cradle for connecting to the PC and syncing/charging.

The hw6965 has a pretty large, 3-inch, 240x240 65k color display. Unlike the E61, the display on this one is a square, 1:1 aspect ratio. The screen is good enough for indoor use, but it gets a little washed out in the sunlight, even at highest brightness levels. The display is touch-screen and the device comes with a stylus and supports handwriting recognition.

The display comes with a flip cover that acts as a screen protector. The large screen on the E61 is also prone to scratches when kept in the pockets with other objects, such as keys and coins, but this won’t be a problem with the iPAQ, thanks to the cover. The cover is transparent, so you can use the device without using the touch screen facilities.

The keypad is full QWERTY, but it’s not as good as the E61. The keys are all around and spaced quite far apart from each other, but they aren’t comfortably big. The keypad on the E61 is the best, followed by the BlackBerry 8700, and then the Sony Ericsson M600i. The soft keys and call/end keys are laid out a little better on this phone and are quite accessible. The 5-way joystick works well, but again it’s not comparable to the Pearl.
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Tech
The phone runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and comes with the standard set of WinMo applications like Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, Pocket MSN, Terminal Services Client etc. There’s also Internet Explorer for browsing the web. The device runs on a 416MHz PXA270 processor that runs Windows really fast, considering this is such a heavily feature-packed phone. With a lot of applications running, the OS does slow down a bit and shows the colorful hourglass, but that’s because most applications don’t quit when you press ‘X’ and hog up memory. To actually kill running programs, you need to go to the memory settings app do so manually.

Speaking of memory, the hw6965 comes with 64MB of RAM, and 45MB of flash ROM. Expansion is handled by a miniSD memory card slot that’s hot-swappable. The memory card slot is on the right side, easily accessible, unlike the E61’s slot which is under the battery cover.

Network connectivity is almost fully covered in the hw6965. The phone is a quad-band GSM phone with support for GPRS and EDGE. There is no 3G, which is probably the only thing missing here. Personal connectivity is handled by Bluetooth, which is still at v1.2 without any support for stereo, WiFi, which is also stuck at 802.11b, Infrared and USB.

New in the hw6965 is the built-in GPS receiver, but while it may work well in places like the US, it’s performance in India is debatable. It can take upto 10 minutes to get the signal, and that too when you’re standing out there in the open. Overall, we weren’t satisfied with the GPS functionality of this phone, at least in India.

Multimedia
The phone comes with Windows Media Player 10 that plays back all your standard MP3 and WMA files and also video. The only issue is that the stereo jack, which is inconveniently located on the bottom of the phone, is of the 2.5mm variety. Given the size of the phone, a more standard 3.5mm stereo jack would have made it instantly compatible with existing headphones and audio equipment without the need for adapters, but hey, at least it’s not a proprietory connector like the E61. Other than media playback, the hw6965 also has a built-in voice recorder.

The hw6965 also comes with a 1.3 megapixel digital camera along with an LED flash. The quality of the camera is below par—the colors came out all de-saturated and washed out, the black levels are really low and there’s excessive grain even in fairly well light day time conditions.

The camera is also extremely slow, taking up to 2-3 seconds to save the image and get ready for the next shot. The HP PhotoSmart-branded camera application generates image names like HP cameras (HPIM0014 etc.).
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Battery
After the impressive battery performance of the E61, one would think even HP might be able to pull it off, but no. Even with all the radios turned off (no WiFi, no Bluetooth, no GPS), you’ll barely manage about two days of battery life with maybe half to one hour of talk time. There isn’t too much to talk about out here—you should simply carry the charging cable with you, which fortunately doesn’t need to the cradle for recharging.

Conclusion
The phone demands an astounding Rs. 37,999. While the performance of the phone and the applications is great, and there are a whole lot of connectivity options ranging from GSM, GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, WiFi, Infrared, USB and even GPS navigation, the E61 is better because it costs half and does all of this, barring the GPS and the digital camera. The GPS doesn’t work too well out here and the camera quality is below par, so I think I’ll stick to the Nokia E61 or even the BlackBerry Pearl, both of which cost a whole lot less.