HP iPAQ 510/514 Voice Messenger Review

Messaging:

Like other Windows Mobile phones, all messages are in a common menu – Messaging. Here you can find all text, multimedia and e-mail messages. When you write something over again, T9 predictive text input system can help you. It can be used with QWERTY hardware keyboard too.

Just a few steps away is the option to add your e-mail account (POP3 or IMAP) and to use your e-mail account on your mobile phone. Very nice extra is that the phone can try to get the email settings automatically from the internet, and so we configured our Gmail Account by entering only the username and password – the OS founds the other settings on its own. We also tried it with Yahoo! and MSN (Hotmail) accounts. Windows Mobile 6 already supports HTML formatted e-mails. The client is very similar to the Outlook on a computer, you can filter your inbox to see just some results, reply to message or forward it to other person. The support for attachments allows you to download or send one, in addition to the text body. The phone can be set to synchronize with your company Exchange Server.


As standard, Windows Mobile comes preloaded with the mobile version of Live! Messenger (MSN). Windows Live account will be added in Messaging when you add your e-mail account.



Connectivity:

The iPAQ 500 is a quad-band GSM, which allows it to be used in all continents.Supporting EDGE data, it uses faster internet connection than it would use with GPRS, which is the previous level. Still, it is not 3G phone, which would enable even faster internet connection.

We are happy that the standard jacks are used – miniUSB for computer connection and 2.5mm jack for music.
For local connection you can use Bluetooth as well. The supported version is 1.2 and using it we experienced transfer speeds of 42 KB per second, which means a MP3 song (5MB for example) transfers for 2 minutes. Multimedia profiles are also supported so you can listen to stereo music wireless.

The phone features an integrated Wi-Fi module for wireless network connection, which also allows for using the internet of that local network. One can easily connect to a home/office network, or any public place where “hotspot” service is supported. Wi-Fi transfer speeds are much higher than GPRS/EDGE ones, and using it for Internet and streaming is not a problem.

You can also connect it to a computer by a USB cable plugged in the bottom port of the phone. An installed Microsoft Active Sync on your PC is required in order to achieve an easy synchronization of the phone with Microsoft Outlook at your will. The program allows for synchronizing of the contacts, calendar entries, To-Dos.


Internet:

As a whole, the browser is not an excellent one, so viewing full-size pages (with 1024 pixel resolution for instance) requires quite an effort at 240 pixel-wide display, let alone at iPAQ’s even smaller176 pixel one, which, of course, will take even more scrolling. It is advisable that you use the “one column view” option to optimize page appearance at the cost of losing part of the content.


Once again, resolution is a drawback, but not that serious in case you use a more modern browser like Microsoft Deepfish, offering a real page review with zoom in/out options. Unfortunately, the final version of this browser has not been released yet.