On the run with HP's iPAQ hw6515 Mobile Messenger

By Nick Hide on 30 September 2005, 5:30pm

Mobility is everything, the epitome of modern living. You can't switch off your PC at the end of the day and expect to spend the evening Windows-free, dear me, no. You need a handheld organiser to take your work with you, to maximise all that commuting downtime, to touch base, to view that vital PDF when you're off the map, to stay on top of those emails. So we're told.

The most recent proponent of this never-ending, Arial-fonted purgatory is Hewlett-Packard, which gave us the opportunity this week to take its newest mobile kit out in the real world (which was very brave). And we were very relieved when it didn't work.

HP's iPAQ hw6515 Mobile Messenger, a sweet little handheld organiser with a lovely 76mm (3-inch) screen, proudly boasts an all-in-one GPS navigation system, so you never get lost on your way to a meeting again. It didn't work. To be fair, GPS triangulates your position by latching on to signals from a few different satellites, so in between big buildings in central London might not be the best test environment. But we went up the London Eye and it still didn't work. We accessed the Internet without a hitch, but the tiny screen struggled to cope with Crave's daunting mixture of text and, er, pictures. Then again, Crave's utopian designers did assume the gadget cognoscenti would be using big screens and broadband connections.

The HP Compaq tc4200 Tablet PC worked like a charm, its swivelling screen instantly switching from landscape to portrait format at the touch of a button, its stylus pen interacting with on-screen icons with comfort and ease. Sadly, when we tried to access the Internet over the incongruous bulge of a Vodafone 3G card, it failed miserably. This was almost certainly Vodafone's fault, because we managed to make a GPRS connection -- but that's yesterday's technology, and too slow for serious downloading or anything more than the most cursory of Web surfing.

So we raced around London, using infrared and GPRS when our Bluetooth, 3G and GPS let us down. We faced down a security guard who thought two laptops, a handheld, five phones and a digital camera was a suspiciously excessive load of tech for five sightseers on the London Eye. We had all the gear, but mostly no idea. If you desperately need to stay connected, let us warn you: the more tech you rely on, the more important it is to have a plan B. -NH

Update: a review of the HP iPAQ hw6516 Mobile Messenger is now live here.