HP iPAQ H191016 December 2002 It's been called the HalfPAQ and the PPCjr, but shortchange the iPAQ H1910 at your peril. This pint-sized PDA is going to be big. The first thing you notice about the H1910 is the size. This thing is small. By Pocket PC standards, it's almost microscopic. It looks and feels smaller than a Palm m515 (which, by the way, sells for $100 more than the H1910). Like the large iPAQs, it's curved at the bottom and along the sides, and it fits the hand as if it were molded for it. The screen is a 3.5" transflective beauty. The technology is the same as the transflective 3.8" screen in the iPAQ H3950, but the slightly smaller screen size makes everything look sharper at the same 240*320 pixels. Screen brightness is superior to the 3.5" transflective screen on the ViewSonic V35, although the H1910 lacks the ambient light sensor of more expensive iPAQs to save power in brightly-lit environments. ClearType is crisp and black, with only a very slight yellowish tint, and the H1910 should be a very popular device among the ebook crowd. The sync connector is the same as the one on the iPAQ 3800/3900 series, but it's oriented 180° opposed. This means that cables (sync, charging, GPS) made for the other iPAQs will work, cradles and keyboards won't because the screen of the device would be facing away from you. The IR port is on the side, so it would even be tough to use the PockeTop IR keyboard. Of course, this is an iPAQ, so I'd expect to see a foldable keyboard for it sooner rather than later. Although a cradle does not come in the box - cables only - a cradle designed specifically for the H1910 is available from HP. The H1910 officially has 64MB of RAM, but we all know by now that only 46.74MB is available to the end user thanks to HP's decision to use NAND Flash RAM. The operating system has to be copied into RAM and run from there, eating up some of that 64MB right from the start. Speaking of the OS, the H1910 uses Pocket PC 2002 Professional Edition, rather than the more common Premium Edition. What's the difference? Premium is a 22MB ROM image, and Professional is 16MB. HP used Professional in the H1910 so they could use a 16MB chip. The H1910 lacks Microsoft Reader, Terminal Services, MSN Messenger, iTask, Transcriber, Windows Media Player and the Word/Inbox spell checker out of the box. All but the last item are included on the CD and can be installed into RAM or onto a storage card later. While the H1910 will never have as much available RAM as the Toshiba e335, it's got more than the ViewSonic V35 and more than 32MB devices like the XDA or the Audiovox Maestro. The CPU is a 200MHz XScale. I've seen lot of people employ the faulty logic of assuming that since the 400MHz XScale in the expensive iPAQ and Toshiba models are not much faster than the aging 206MHz StrongARM, then the 200MHz XScale in the H1910 must be really slow. Think of the 200-400MHz thing this way. Let's say you've got a Hugo that can do 60mph max. You also have a Porsche that can top 200mph. Your town has a maximum speed limit of 55mph and you never speed. Which car is really faster? Because of the 100MHz data bus, the 400MHz XScale spends more time waiting than the 200MHz version, but the end result is pretty much the same. The H1910's 200MHz XScale feels no slower than the 206MHz StrongARM. If a Maestro is fast enough for you, a H1910 will be too. The controls are a mixed bag. There is no jog wheel. While this isn't exactly a departure from the iPAQ line, if they were going to make it sleeve-incompatible anyway a jog wheel would have been a nice addition. The buttons are close together, but they're solid with good tactile feedback. The placement will probably annoy gamers, but they're fine for business use. The directional pad is HP/Compaq's best yet, very similar to the Palm Tungsten T. The center "action" button is separate, making it virtually impossible to accidentally press down when you mean to select something (a problem I have at least daily with the XDA). And for what it's worth, pressing diagonally down/right will take you from cell A1 to B2 in Pocket Excel. The side of the device does have the record button and what appears to be a pin to hold a lanyard clip. This iPAQ is small and light enough to wear around your neck, so what the heck. The back shows a removable battery that almost seems like it shouldn't be there on a device this size. The battery itself sits inside a removable door, and it looks a lot like a cell phone battery. The 900MAh capacity isn't much to write home about, but the 200MHz processor and the transflective screen (which doesn't need as bright a light as a energy-wasting reflective screen) should make that 900MAh last longer than similar batteries in older Pocket PCs. The screen has five brightness settings, from no backlight (a little darker than reflective screens with the sidelight off) to as bright and crisp as a good laptop screen. 50% brightness on the H1910 looks about as bright as my XDA, so folks that actually like the "Super Bright" setting on older iPAQs shouldn't be disappointed with max brightness on the H1910. Like all iPAQs, the H1910 is an audio powerhouse. The Settings screen allows for adjustable treble, bass and even has a "Super Bass" checkbox for audio through the headphones. The speaker is behind the directional pad, but even that sounds surprisingly good. An H1910 with a big SD card - and Windows Media Player installed - would make a nice music player. The iPAQ H1910 comes preinstalled with Microsoft's End User Update 3, including the "Bliss" Today theme and minor fixes. Windows Media Player 8.5, included with EUU3, is supposed to offer much smoother audio and video playback. The only downside, really, is that the headphone jack is the 2.5mm jack common on cell phones rather than the standard 3.5mm jack used on other audio players. This means that if you don't use the earbuds that come with the H1910 (which are quite nice) then you'll have to get an adaptor to plug in 3.5mm headphones. Output isn't the only area where the H1910's audio shines. The microphone has some interesting settings that I don't think I've seen on any other Pocket PCs. In addition to the normal microphone gain settings, it can also be set for "Short Range" and "Conference Room." This latter setting could come in handy for conducting interviews. The stylus is metal, and very similar to the stylus found in the XDA. This should come as no surprise, given that Taiwanese HTC actually manufactures both devices. It's a bit on the small size, but it's nowhere near as bad as some styli I've seen. So what's the bottom line? This is going to be the biggest tiny device to hit the market since the original Palm V. The iPAQ H1910 shatters traditional barriers for Pocket PCs in both size and price, creating a completely new market segment for Pocket PCs among customers that used to be exclusively Palm buyers. Students and other folks that might not have considered Pocket PCs otherwise now have a heck of a reason to try one. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |