HP iPAQ 910 Business Messenger Unlocked Cell Phone with US 3G, 3 MP Camera, Media Player, MicroSD Slot - U.S. Version with Warranty

I purchased the HP iPAQ 910c Business Messenger about 2 months ago. At the time it seemed a very excellent phone. Here are my thoughts.
NOTE: I am reviewing the product as a PDA, as I have no phone service in this phone yet. When I get service I will update the review.

***THE PHONE***
The phone itself is very sturdy, despite being made of plastic. It feels good in the hand, and the keyboard is good for typing out emails and text messages. The screen size doesn't bother me as much as it would bother some people, as being a small landscape touch screen (QVGA). I also liked the scroll wheel on the side of the phone. It is convenient when scrolling through email or changing the volume in Windows Media Player.

One things I wish was better is battery life. I left the phone on with push services turned on and wifi connection. It lost battery around 7 hours later. I ended up purchasing the extended battery, which needed a case with a huge hump in the back of the phone, which looks ugly and feels ugly to hold. The same test, the phone drained about 10 hours later. Not much of an improvement in my own opinion. One fear I have is when I get service with unlimited data, the battery life will be even worse.

Another thing I disliked was the location of the speaker. Its on the back of the phone, and that hinders the sound when the phone is laying on its back.

All in all, the phone itself is an excellent device, and I would call it top of the line. So why did I give it 2 stars? Well its because of...

***THE SOFTWARE***
The HP iPAQ 910c is powered by Microsoft Windows Mobile v6.1. Now the last windows mobile device I used ran Windows Mobile 2003, which was an excellent mobile platform to use. I figured a later version would be even better. Boy was I wrong. Windows Mobile 6.1 is very unstable and buggy. A day of use with this phone always included a crash, slow-down or hang-up. I also disliked the fact that at some points, Windows Mobile rejected my MicroSD card, forcing me to reboot the device.

Despite running Windows Mobile, there was good software loaded onto the phone. It came with HP Photosmart Mobile, which is much better than WM's default Pictures and Video software. It came with the other usual stuff, Office, Outlook (which sucks, by the way), Windows Media, and Windows Live. It also came with a Java manager, so I could play games and use the famous Opera Mini web browser.

I loaded selects of my music collection onto my phone for those times I forget my iPod. Windows Media player gets the job done quite well. Sound quality is great when the included headset is plugged in. Not as great using the default speaker. I cant say as much for video though. Being a business phone, I dont think this phone was designed for playing video. The video would skip every now and then.

The camera on the phone took good quality photos, and the camera app was decent, but I found no way to get it to flash when taking the pictures, there was only a button which turned the flash on and stay on, which could really blind someone fast.

As far as software goes, I dont like it. Windows Mobile 6.1 is not a stable platform. I constantly have to reboot the device, and I cannot stand the frequent slowdowns.

***THE BOTTOM LINE***
Well, as expected, HP has outdone themselves in the quality of the device. It looks good, it feels good, and it is very sturdy, despite the plastic casing. It's a shame to see such an excellent phone loaded with such a horrible platform. Windows Mobile 6.1 is not a good platform to work on. It's unstable and unreliable. You never know when it will freeze or crash.

If I were to give HP a tip to improve this phone, I'd tell them to look into adopting Symbian OS and using it, or taking the source code and writing their own version. Windows Mobile is not good, and is literally the downfall of this otherwise excellent device.

If you are looking for a blackberry-type of phone with windows mobile 6.1 this is the best.

Very handy, powerful, elegant. A bigger screen and less thickness would make it fit the word perfect.

I owned this phone for about a week. I was pretty excited by how many features it had in such a small package: touch screen (small, but still useful), wifi, 3g, GPS, Windows Mobile 6.1, built-in keyboard, the list goes on...

First off, I actually like Windows Mobile for its similarity to Windows on the desktop. I tried a Nokia e71 with Symbian, and I found the user interface somewhat inconsistent between applications. Windows Mobile apps usually follow a pretty standard way of doing menus and icons. This Ipaq performed very well, though I have had other Windows Mobile devices which are sluggish.

Next, the keyboard. I found this Ipaq's keyboard suffers from one primary problem: the four-way navigation pad is too close to the top row of keys. Time and time again I accidentally hit the "down" button when trying to hit the T or a Y. Apart from that the keyboard was cramped but pretty useful.

GPS: I used Google maps which is a free download if your device doesn't come with it. What an awesome program to have for free. The program itself worked great, but it often took the Ipaq over one minute to acquire the GPS signal. Sometimes it used cell phone towers to get my approximate location, so while it was tracking down the GPS signal the "where am I" dot on the map would jump all over the place. Other times, it would not do this and would just wait and wait until it found the GPS signal to show me where I was. There is some kind of application on the Ipaq (which I forget the name of) that lets you download additional GPS information from the internet so it is faster to acquire the GPS signal. I ran this program numerous times but it did not seem to make a difference in how fast it locked onto the GPS. Once it was locked on, it updated very quickly and very accurately. Given that, GPS would be perfectly useful on this device if you already had it turned on before you started your trip. Or, perhaps another pay-for-use mapping program would not have the same problem Google Maps did.

Battery life: Other reviews have complained the battery life on this device is pretty short and that the battery gets hot while using the device (even when not charging). I did find the battery pack got warm while on a call or using the PDA functions. Battery felt on par with other smartphones I have owned (T-mobile MDA, Cingular 8525). In other words: not very impressive, but good enough to get through one day.

Last: In spite of these minor weaknesses, I really liked this phone. Sadly, call quality was just not up to par. I found I had to have the volume on maximum all the time, and the sound output seemed too grainy/staticky compared to other cell phones. I decided that for the price of this phone, the sound quality should be nothing less than excellent, so I wound up returning it and going back to my incredibly-bulky-but-sounds-good Cingular 8525 (HTC TyTN).

I have owned a fair number of WM phones (Wizard, BlackJack, Kaiser) and am a heavy user for both voice and data. I must say, if you want a solid voice and messaging phone, this is it. It's light, thin, decent keyboard, bright screen, and the fact it is WM6.1 Pro with a touch screen make it totally incomparable to the Q or BlackJack I/II. Most of the complaints I have read are more from people who don't really use WM phones - fact is, they need to be charged every single day. Get used to it!

I have played with the HTC Touch Pro and iPhone, and both are elegant, but if you are like me and do a lot of business travel, need solid messaging, and actually have to write real responses, I would be hard pressed to find a better candidate.

The only downside so far - I don't like the rubber cover over the USB port - will probably just cut it off!