MaximumPC 2005 10

 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2005

reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

R

emember the classic Princess phone?

You picked it up, pressed some but-

tons, yapped with a friend until 8:30 p.m.,

and then hung up to watch Rhoda on TV. It

was simple, functional, and downright mod-

est in the way it made a complex technol-

ogy 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 fre-

quent wireless use.

But despite the

Mobile Messenger’s

superb accomplish-

ments 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 tradition-

al 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 sty-

lus 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 sun-

light. 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.

ˆLOGAN DE#+ER

HP iPaq hw6515

Mobile Messenger

Nothing ruins a party like a square

$450, http://www.hp.com

HW6515 MOBILE MESSENGER

LOYALTY

A breeze to use, comfy

keypad, and excellent GPS

tracking.

ROYALTY

7

Square screen, awful camera,

wheezy processor.

(Ps -obile -essenger is a superior communicator, but

this sQuare-display business needs to stop right now.

4.6"

7 "

PROCESSOR Intel PXA272 312MHz

DISPLAY 240x240 3-inch TFT, 64K color, backlit

MEMORY 64MB ROM, 64MB RAM, 55MB

available to user

WEIGHT 6 ounces

WIRELESS Quad-band GSM, EDGE network

support, Bluetooth, GPS, IrDA

FEATURE^

HIGHLIGHTS

1.3-megapixel camera, integrated

microphone and speakerphone,

SD/miniSD slots

SOFTWARE

HIGHLIGHTS

TomTom GPS Navigator

(one free city map)

SPECS

PIXELPUS(ERS

The Mobile Messenger’s 240x240 screen is

a “feature” supported by Windows Mobile

2003 Second Edition. WM2003SE also

supports the newer, high-end Pocket PCs

with 480x640 VGA resolution—that’s four

times more pixels than you’ll get with a

traditional 240x320 QVGA Pocket PC. But if

you indulge in a VGA Pocket PC, you may be

shocked to find you don’t get four times the

screen real estate in many apps, as QVGA

games and applications are “stretched” to

the full screen area. But VGA screens sport

four pixels for every single pixel in a QVGA

display, and WM2003SE uses the extra

pixels to draw sharper text and display

images that retain more of the detail from

their high-resolution originals.