HP iPaq hw6915: Swiss Army handheld

By Rory Reid on 23 May 2006, 11:43am

Being at the cutting edge of the gadget world has its drawbacks. Our love for anything with an LCD screen means we can barely walk under the weight of our iPods, mobile phones, sat-nav kits, PDAs, laptops, games consoles and digital cameras. If only there was some way to combine them all...

Frustrated by our failed attempts to Superglue all the aforementioned items to each other, we've resorted to using the brand new HP iPaq hw6915 Mobile Messenger. It's all our tech dreams come true. It incorporates a quad-band mobile phone, TomTom-powered GPS satellite navigation, 1.3-megapixel camera and Wi-Fi-ready PDA in one BlackBerry-shaped package.

The iPaq hw6915 uses Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition, so it offers a wide range of usage possibilities. It comes with Mobile versions of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and though its integrated alphanumeric keyboard is a little on the small side, it's perfect for typing short documents, emails and instant messages.

The device has a large 76mm (3-inch) display, which is good for browsing the Web, and it's 175g chassis is fairly light (a Motorola Razr V3x weighs 125g). It's also pretty quick thanks to a 416MHz Intel PXA270 processor and 192MB of total memory, though this can be upgraded if you have a miniSD memory card.

It isn't cheap at £453, but considering it does just about everything that a laptop can do (and more), we think it's a small price to pay. Watch out for a full review soon. -RR