HP rw6815 Mobile Communicator Review

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

I am writ­ing this on the train on my way into work and the fact that I am writ­ing using my old psion series 5 (Still the best key­board sys­tem money can
buy) and not my new HP rw6915 per­fectly high­lights the major shortcoming/trade-off of this smartphone.

Of course, one man’s short­com­ing is another man’s advant­age, and like all
trade-offs’ the HP’s is one of its biggest advantages.

Also, since the qual­ity of any advice is meas­ured by the exper­i­ence and know­ledge of that per­son giv­ing it, let me give you a little back­ground to myself before con­tinu­ing any fur­ther. My pro­fes­sional life is that of a Chartered IT man­ager for a small inter­na­tional bank in the city of Lon­don. So I am a both a busi­ness user and a techy’ and I need everything; a phone, a PDA, a depart­ment man­age­ment device, Out­look 2007 sync abil­ity, lots of stor­age space, a media player, a cam­era, a doc­u­ment reader, wi-fi Inter­net access and Bluetooth.

On the other hand I am also an artist mar­ried to a graphic designer, this means that I insist on form as well as func­tion and this has, for example, led to me reject­ing many “gad­gets” because they are bulky or do not fit in with the sleek busi­ness class look I insist on with my per­sonal carrys. I also HATE iPods.

So, I should be in a very good pos­i­tion to review this PDA phone!

Before buy­ing the HP I owned the excel­lent, but brick-like Nokia 9500 communicator…

9500: Part PDA, part self-defense weapon, all brick

…as well as the N80 (spit!) and the dis­astrous N73 (which crashed mid call with an alarm­ing consistency)

N73: Eeeeevil!

After that exper­i­ence I went “old school” and for the last year have been man­aging my depart­ment using the amaz­ingly high tech Hip­ster PDA.

The Hip­ster PDA is a paper-based organ­izer. A tongue-in-cheek reac­tion to the increas­ing expense and com­plex­ity of per­sonal digital assist­ants, the Hip­ster PDA  simply com­prises a sheaf of index cards held together with a binder clip.

To beat that the HP has a job on its hands!

I bought the HP from a busi­ness sup­pler I know at TET, but it is widely avail­able every­where now. This is not the first Win­dows PDA I have owned as I still have, gath­er­ing dust in my draw, a Dell Axim PDA that they gave me as an apo­logy in 2003. Com­ing from the bad exper­i­ence of that I was ready to tackle the new Microsoft Win­dows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC, Phone Edi­tion, with an eye to the essen­tial prob­lem with Microsoft equip­ment; the blue screen

The box con­tained the PDA, a rather poor belt clip case, the soft­ware
bundle, a mini-USB cable and a mul­tiad­apter char­ging plug, which was quite
nice and allows you to fit whatever plug suits you coun­try. Of course the
PDA itself with charge from the USB socket, of the power adapter was bunged
in my work bag for use at home.  It also con­tained a nifty little set of headphones/hands free kit.

The look and feel of the sys­tem is a little plasticy, but this is all to the good as it ser­i­ously reduces the weight com­pared with oth­ers of its ilk.

Size wise it is sim­ilar to a pack of cards and there­fore big­ger than most phones. The screen is quite large and clear and my first impres­sions of the clar­ity and bright­ness in the dark and sun­light were positive.

Essen­tial specs are:

• Microsoft Win­dows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC, Phone Edi­tion,
  Mobile Ver­sions of Microsoft® soft­ware are included (Word® Mobile, Excel® Mobile, Power­Point® Mobile, Inter­net Explorer Mobile, Win­dows Media Player 10 Mobile and Messaging)
• 2.7” trans­missive TFT, 65K col­ours, LED back­light with power save mode
• Integ­rated WLAN 802.11b, Bluetooth® 1.2, IrDA
• Integ­rated tri band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone
• HP exclus­ive applic­a­tions: Today Panel Lite, Java Vir­tual Machine, Auto Con­fig­ur­ator , Microsoft Voice Com­mand , Wi-Fi Util­ity tool, Modem Link
• Integ­rated HP Pho­tos­mart Cam­era 2 Mega­pixel with LED light, 1600 x 1200 res­ol­u­tion, JPEG and 3 GP formats
• 2.7” trans­missive TFT, 65K col­ours, LED back­light with power save mode
• 140 g
• 5.8 x 1.9 x 10.2 cm
• Intel® PXA272 Pro­cessor 416 MHz
• 192 MB total ROM memory (128 MB ROM avail­able for per­sist­ent stor­age, 64 MB SDRAM), cer­ti­fied up to 1 GB
• Slots Mini-SD slot sup­ports 4-bit mini-SD memory standards
• Oper­at­ing sys­tem applic­a­tions: Cal­en­dar, Con­tacts, Tasks, Voice Recorder, Notes, Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, Power­Point Mobile, Inter­net Explorer Mobile

The stylus is hous­ing is slightly covered by the fold down plastic screen cover and there­fore a little fiddley to remove from its slot, but then I guess either HP know that you will per­man­ently remove the screen cover or that the cover pro­tects the stylus from loss.

In any case the cover is a cause of pleas­ure and pain. Firstly, it took me two days to real­ise that it is tightly wrapped in two scratch proof pack­ing plastic sheets and only once I removed those could I see through the cover to the screen.

You can use the phone with the cover in either pos­i­tion, but with it up you may touch the screen with your ear and press some­thing by acci­dent, you will also look like you are on Startrek.

Yes, this is the Star­fleet Communicator,

Scotty, get us out of here!

Win­dows Mobile 5.0 is the main soft­ware in this device.  The today screen is now a well known hub of all the inform­a­tion you need to run your day.  Your latest items in Out­look, any emails or texts, notifications of meet­ings and incom­ing call are all dis­played here.  A link to skype or MSN, which is excel­lent, can be added and a graph­ical readout of the remain­ing charge and space on the device is slot­ted along the top. 

My busi­ness needs for the machine is a note taker in meet­ings as well as a stor­age device for vari­ous inform­a­tion.  luck­ily space on the HP is large.  Over a hun­dred meg is avail­able from the start and I per­son­ally used that for pro­gram installs and chucked in a 2GB memory card (mini SD — £15) for data such as pod­casts, doc­u­ments, etc.  With the quick change of the SD cards, it is pos­sible to carry a very large amount of data rel­at­ively simply.  Some­thing I use to great effect by hav­ing all my depart­mental man­age­ment doc­u­ments on me at all times as well as a com­plete sync of my emails and attachments.

Using the HP as a note taker is easy as well.  The sys­tem comes with a vari­ety of text input options, includ­ing onscreen key­board and let­ter recog­ni­tion.  Per­son­ally, I use the full text recog­ni­tion and write dir­ectly onto the screen in joined up let­ters, which the sys­tem trans­lates incred­ibly well con­sid­er­ing my lack luster hand­writ­ing skill.  I have tweaked the options a bit and I can get to about half as fast as my typ­ing, so say 50 words a minute if I pushed it.

The bonus is of course that these notes then sync to the com­puter auto­mat­ic­ally and I can cre­ate a file for each day, each meet­ing, or whatever and con­tinue work­ing it on my laptop later.

Other busi­ness func­tions is the use of MS word and Excel and it is very easy to bring up spread­sheets on the move and col­lect inform­a­tion, some­thing I often do in my meet­ings when chal­lenged for some data I can­not recall, but don’t want to break out a laptop.  Because the sys­tem has Infrared, as well as the now ubi­quit­ous WIFI/Bluetooth, I can print dir­ectly to any HP series printer by just aim­ing at its built in IRDA receiver and the res­ults are fast and smooth.

In use my first head­ache came with set­ting up Act­ive­sync.  I obvi­ously want to sync wire­lessly like I would with my old N73.  Set­ting this up is a little com­plic­ated and for me this situ­ation was massively exacer­bated as my laptop has a Dell built in Bluetooth mod­ule.  This mod­ule does not use the stand­ard Microsoft Bluetooth stack and thus it basic­ally did not work at all.  Only after a day for fuck­ing around did I even­tu­ally decide to lit­er­ally open up my laptop and dig out the mod­ule.  I then used my old USB Bluetooth dongle and ping Act­ive­sync worked imme­di­ately.  Clearly M$ only likes M$. How­ever, once that hurdle was jumped it was smooth sail­ing all the way.

Act­ive­sync syncs Out­look message’s status as well as the mes­sage itself, so if the mes­sage is unread in Out­look it will sync as unread to the PDA.  This is a nice func­tion and very smoothly done by Win­dows.  I am using the latest Beta ver­sion of Act­ive­sync but it still has lim­it­a­tions.  Namely that WIFI sync is dis­abled.  Mad­ness.  The Microsoft developer blog sug­gests that this is because the WIFI sync is cur­rently inher­it­ably unse­cured and they are work­ing on it. 

 

 

The offi­cial (and true) reason has always been stated as “We removed it for secur­ity reas­ons.”  But, judging from the num­ber of angry com­ments I see pos­ted here, that explan­a­tion hasn’t really con­vinced any­one that it was a good idea.  So, let me go into more detail.  The first major issue is this: Exchange Act­ive­Sync is encryp­ted and desktop Act­ive­Sync isn’t.

Frankly, they don’t appear to be work­ing very hard con­sid­er­ing this is some­thing we all want ASAP.  So, at the moment, it is bluetooth or cable. 

Non busi­ness func­tions are also import­ant to me.  I listen weekly to a num­ber of pod­casts includ­ing Massively Online Gamer and This Week In Tech and I simply drag them to the sync folder and bosh they are copied to the device wirelessly.

When listen­ing to pod­casts, if the phone rings then it pauses while you talk and then switches back, which works very well indeed.

Another fine fea­ture that has come on in leaps and bounds is the voice com­mand soft­ware.  In the past this stuff was frankly crap, but now, well you don’t even have to train it.  I was simply play­ing with all the built in fea­tures and before I knew it I was able to call people with a simple:

[push but­ton] *BEEP* “Call Francesca Bell Work”

Bang! The num­ber is dial­ing.  It is very good and I often use it rather than press through the menus.

This brings me to web brows­ing.  The WIFI sys­tem is not the all singing, all dan­cing latest, but it is still fast as hell.  I have WIFI at home and often want to grab some info without boot­ing my PC and this is a very quick answer.  I did, how­ever, quickly get fed up with IE and switch to Opera and this has a cost attached, but all in all the web based exper­i­ence is very friendly and I am very happy surf­ing my emails or brows­ing the forums.

So, what is wrong with this device?

Bat­tery life is actu­ally very good.  Like all WIFI devices, you will need to carry a char­ger with you or have one around on a weekend.

The prob­lems come when com­bin­ing this essen­tially PDA func­tion­al­ity with the use of the device as a phone.  So, for example, when brows­ing your con­tacts through the phone con­trol but­tons on the out­side there is no but­ton to close any selec­ted con­tact or text mes­sage.  Instead you need to flip open the cover and press the small cross at the top right of the screen.  This leads to all sorts of muck­ing around with either get­ting the stylus out or using your fin­ger.  It also com­pletely breaks the idea of using a phone with one hand only.  Often it is easier to use the voice com­mand than piss about through the menus as you are try­ing to walk around.  Now, for me, I call the same 10 people over and over and so I have them all set up as speed­di­als.  How­ever, get­ting to the speed dial screen is more but­ton presses’s than needed.  In fact it is a bit of a pain.

Also, like all Win­dows Mobile devices you will very quickly come to love the soft reset. In fact I actu­ally soft reset every night when I go to bed.  Memory leak­ing is com­mon and M$ have for some insane reason made it that select­ing the cross on the top corner of the screen doesn’t actu­ally close the applic­a­tion you are in.  IT merely swaps it into back memory.  I under­stand that there are reas­ons for this, but frankly I would prefer it to be oth­er­wise.  When I want some­thing closed; close it!

I have also had prob­lems Bluetooth things to people.  I receive things with no prob­lems, it is just seem­ingly bey­ond this device to send someone something.

Finally, the cam­era is a joke.  My N73 cam­era was excel­lent, and this is a very large step backwards.

Hav­ing said this, there is a lot of soft­ware and hard­ware out there to help.  I have a set of bluetooth head­phones com­ing that are wire­less and I will let you know how I get one with them.  I also have a 3rd party cradle/speakers set com­ing and that should make pod­cast­ing in the office easier.

All in all my last few weeks with this device have made me a bit of a fan.  I was fully aware of the lim­it­a­tions of Win­dows Mobile used as a phone and wasn’t expect­ing a Nokia like phone exper­i­ence.  Which is good because you don’t get one.  What you get is a great attempt to unify many devices into one and I think that 90% of it is successful.

 Basho

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