Yes, I’ve looked forward to the acquaintance with HP iPAQ 614 for a long time. For our current project our firm ordered some devices, especially this one, which I’ve got yesterday per post! Well my first impression is rather equivocal… If we look at the technical details, this device is a great machine, a real monster:

The positive apect is also the fine HP quality (well, I’m a real HP fan). This device feels quite nice in the hand and looks very noble. However, the size of iPAQ 614 makes it definitely to a real men toy.

In general I’m quite happy with my new mate, but still there is a number of shortcomings, which one not sees at the first glance. First of all it’s the keypad. I found it a bit dissapointing, that it is almost too large and uncomfortable for typing by one hand (for me it is an important factor, because I type very often sms by driving the car ). The innovative “smart-touch navigation wheel” is imho also a really weired and useless thing. It’s difficult to use and makes the text input to a complicated task. That is why after a short hasitation I just switched it off. I think, it would be much better, if iPAQ 614 had a traditional joystick like most of the PDAs and communicators.

The next negative aspect is the silent speaker. Not only the ring tones sound bad, but also all the programs audio output. For comparison using TomTom at my Nokia N73 is much more pleasant than Tomtom navigator at iPAQ 614.

Now a couple of words to unusual built-in Qualcomm MSM6280 GPS chip. The first impression is good. I tested it with my TomTom software and Google mobile client. Quite fine precision and comparable short time for finding a fix point. At this point I’d like to mention a strange peculiarity. GPS reciever is disabled by default. You can see that in iPAQ hardware manager. Only when you start some GPS based application, GPS modul gets automatically activated. One tipp for TomTom users: in your GPS options choose “Other NMEA GPS Receiver” and then COM6 port (some Blogs recommend port COM8, but in my case it didn’t work). It may take a while till the GPS reciever wakes up.

I guess that were the most interesting fact, that are worth mentioning here. As I already said, in general HP iPAQ 614 is a nice toy with great computing capacities. Whether it is a thing for you…hm, depends on your own taste. My personal persuasion has got more firm: it’s better to have separately a compact mobile phone for making calls and a pocket PC for all the other needs The hybride solutions are just still not ripe enough.

May 18th, 2008 at 3:31 am | category: GPS, General topics, Handheld devices