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HP iPAQ Data Messenger Review

I recently got my hands on a retail version of HP’s iPAQ Data Messenger phone (European version).

It’s a nice, simple and stylish looking Pocket PC phone which is a tad smaller than the iPAQ 600 I have. To summarize in one sentence what the HP Data Messenger is all about, it’s actually a slightly smaller iPAQ 600 with a QWERTY keyboard and more fashion sense.

The main features of the HP iPAQ Data Messenger is a 2.8 inch QVGA (320 X 240) touchscreen, a slide-out backlit QWERTY keyboard from the side, with an optical navigation pad and touch sensitive controls on the front, 3 megapixel camera and it runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro. There’s also a 2.5 mm headphone jack for making calls/listening to music and micro USB port for charging and connectivity to your computer.

Sure, I do not doubt what people think about the iPAQ Data Messenger – even at the time of its debut, which was around October 2008, it’s specifications already looked dull, dusty and outdated compared to its competitors with similar form factors (that is, devices running WM 6.1 Pro with slide-out QWERTY keyboards). Both the Sony Xperia X1 and HTC Touch Pro offer either larger/higher resolution screens than the HP Data Messenger and come with their own Today Interface, which attempts to cover, what people brand as hideous and clunky, the Windows Mobile UI.

So what’s the point of the HP iPAQ Data Messenger, you ask? Well, it’s mainly targeted at business people who want a straight forward business Pocket PC phone (And we all know Windows and Windows Mobile mean business). It’s not meant to be a flashy or show-off phone with tons of bells and whistles. I find the Sony Xperia X1 a bit on the pricey side (which Sony product isn’t?) while the HTC Touch Pro is the true competitor of the HP Data Messenger and will probably steal quite a few sales thanks to its superior specifications.

However, what’s going for the Data Messenger, versus the Touch Pro 1, is that it has a 2.5 mm headphone jack (I can easily plug in an adapter for 3.5 mm standard headphones) and the fact that I can start out with a fresh phone and install whichever 3rd party Windows Mobile Today Interface that I want. Compared to the new Touch Pro 2 and other new phones released over the past week this month and it’s a different story; those other phones are much more appealing, sadly.

The only way HP can probably fight for now is by lowering the price of the Data Messenger so more people will go for it… and get off their butts NOW to the design room, then hopefully down the road somewhere, release more appealing and competitive iPAQs which are actually able to stand toe-to-toe against the competition!

I love HP (especially their notebooks) but I seriously think they should actually put in some effort into their Pocket PC/smart phone department!

HP Elitebook 8730w battery life numbers

Based on my extensive usage and testing of the HP Elitebook 8730w (2.53 GHz dual core, 4 GB RAM, 17 inch DreamColor screen, Windows Vista Business, Nvidia Quadro FX3700M 1GB workstation graphics) since November, I’ve come up with a list of battery life numbers that can be achieved using this Mobile Workstation notebook PC. Using the included primary battery:

• Gaming – 1 hour (Display at the brightest setting, high performance mode)
• Graphics rendering – 1 hour 30 minutes
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 continuous use – 1 hour 40 minutes
• High-definition movie playback – 1 hour 40 minutes (Display at the brightest setting)
• Documents, excel and casual web surfing – 2 hours 30 minutes
• Combined usage (Some documents and typing, music through headphones and Photoshop CS4) – 2 hours (Display at medium brightness, balanced power mode)

These numbers were recorded when the battery ran down to 3% and Windows went into sleep mode. The battery life numbers have also been rounded down to the nearest 10 minutes.

So there you have it; now you know what to expect from the HP Elitebook 8730w when performing specific tasks. Adding on a secondary battery, that is HP’s Extended Battery option, will effectively double those numbers listed above.

Gaming on the Elitebook 8730w

Besides running Photoshop CS4 and other heavy duty applications, I’ve found the HP Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation fairly adept at gaming, to a certain extent. That’s what I’ve been doing throughout most of last month: gaming on HP’s Elitebook 8730w.

Before I go on, let me give you guys a run down of the specifications on the one I managed to test out:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53 GHz
• 4 GB of RAM (2 X 2 GB)
• 17 inch Dream Color display (1920 X 1200 resolution!!)
• 160 GB SATA II Hard Disk
• NVIDIA Quadro FX3700M graphics card (1 GB of dedicated memory)

So this is sort of the middle child of the Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation line with top graphics and a really nice, but expensive, Dream Color display. Yet this isn’t the best processor it can take (there are configurations with Core 2 Extreme processors available) and larger hard drive options available (HP currently offers up to 320 GB).

Anyway, the Elitebook 8730w runs most games really smoothly, even at the highest settings. I say most games because I haven’t tried things like Crysis Warhead on it yet. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs fine (well, most of the time) at full 1920 x 1200 and everything else set at the highest/best quality settings; with frame rates going at around 60 to 90 frames per second.

Unfortunately, there are some shortcomings to using a workstation-class (!!!) graphics card for gaming. For those who aren’t familiar, workstation-class graphics cards like the Nvidia Quadro card on the 8730w are meant to deliver quality frames as opposed to quantity of frames on real gaming cards. Somebody told me that they’re both based on the same thing, only tweaked later for their respective purposes but we’ll save that debate for some other time.

So you can get an amazing amount of detail and fairly smooth frame rates, though you certainly won’t get  200 frames per second as you would on a real gaming PC. Enter very intense game scenes when using a workstation graphics card, and frame rate tends to choke. A good example is when somebody throws a smoke screen bomb or calls in an airstrike which lands in the area in front of you in Call of Duty 4, frame rate drops down to 20 FPS… and you don’t even need benchmarking software for that, for I could notice the frame rate drop noticeably with just my eyes.

It’s not HP’s or Nvidia’s fault for that by the way, blame me for maxing out all the textures and setting “soften smoke edges” to ON (LOL!). Again, I had maxed out literally everything in the game… if I had turned off or lowered some of the settings, perhaps the frames wouldn’t have dropped so drastically.

But really, a workstation graphics card, or a mobile workstation notebook for that matter, should NOT be used if you plan on doing some serious gaming. It’s fine if you’re doing some casual gaming (in my book, that means you don’t smash your head on your keyboard if you die because of choppy frame rates when someone calls in an airstrike) to unwind after a day of rendering Shrek 4 scenes. You could use the Elitebook 8730w at several LAN parties with friends, but you probably shouldn’t use it in gaming tournaments where the different between life-and-death matters…

HP Firefly “Mobile Blackbird”

If you thought huge notebooks like the HP Elitebook 8730w or HP HDX “Dragon” were huge, you can add another notebook from HP to the list: the HP+Voodoo Firefly concept aka the “Mobile Blackbird“. This thing features a main 17 inch display AND a secondary 4.3 inch display below the main one. In addition, the Mobile Blackbird packs a Core 2 Extreme processor, 5.1 speaker system, dual ATI graphics card and what looks like FOUR headphone jacks in photos. They’ve also moved the touchpad (which is multi-touch, by the way) to the right hand side of the notebook compared to the usual below-the-spacebar position… you know, where you’d normally find the numeric pad on other notebooks with lots of keyboard real estate.

Right now, this gaming notebook still remains a concept and probably won’t be released onto store shelves. But still, it looks like a solid concept and a sign of good things to come.