Inexpensive but capable business smartphone

The HP iPaq 510/514 is a smartphone running Windows Mobile 6 for Smartphones. It’s aimed primarily at cost-conscious business users, and is normally sold as an unlocked phone by business electronics retailers rather than through one of the major cellular service providers. The 510 (Europe and Canada) and the 514 (USA) are identical except for some minor unspecified regional differences. In Europe HP has also introduced a more expensive 614 model with a bigger screen and faster processor, but some sort of legal patent dispute over cellular chipsets is keeping them from bringing it to the USA.

This is my second Windows Mobile smartphone, so perhaps I’m not that smart, but I’ll do my best to give it a full review anyway.

The main features of the 510/514 are:
- Quad-band GSM + GPRS Edge
- 200 MHz OMAP processor
- Runs Windows Mobile 6.0 for Smartphones
- 2 inch, 220 x 176 pixel, 65K color LCD screen
- Phone keypad with 4-way navigation button
- WiFi (802.11 b/g with WEP/WPA-PSK encryption support)
- Bluetooth
- Speakerphone
- Built in 1.3 Megapixel camera, supports video capture with sound
- Standard mini-USB interface to PC (USB cable included)
- MicroSD card slot
- 2.5mm mini-jack for stereo headphones/mic (stereo headphones included)
- Voice Command
- Charge over USB (AC-USB charger included)

The phone is fairly slim and compact, although not as thin and light as some. There are a few trade-offs for the small size and relatively low cost compared to other smartphones:

- Undersized screen does not meet the QVGA resolution standard (320x200) needed by some software
- Keypad is a bit small and cramped, relies on traditional keypad data entry
- Camera has no flash, no lens cover

No case is included, and the unprotected plastic LCD screen on the front and the camera lens on the back are likely to be scratched easily over time. Either you’ll need an optional cover for the phone, or you’ll just have to get desensitized to scratches.

It’s nice that HP has used a standard mini-USB interface (on the bottom of the phone) for both data communication and charging the phone. It’s the sensible thing to do – too bad all the other manufacturers don’t do the same! HP provides a USB data cable and a USB wall charger, both of which can be freely interchanged with similar cables and chargers. The phone charges fully over USB in a couple of hours. HP claims 6.5 hours talk time and nearly a week on standby, but I don’t get anything close to that since I frequently use WiFi and media player functions.

The phone uses standard microSD cards, with the card slot covered by an attached rubber cover on the lower left side. There’s no mention of the maximum card capacity, and I’ve only tested it with 1 Gbyte. Unfortunately the first 1 Gbyte microSD card I tried didn’t work. It turns out that HP has a compatibility problem with the cards from one particular Taiwanese manufacturer which are widely sold under various brand names, and that’s the one I happened to have. I swapped it with another guy’s card of a different make, which allowed both of us to have a functioning 1 Gbyte microSD card.

Ergonomics:

As with most color LCD screens, the one on this phone is bright enough indoors, but very difficult to see in outdoor sunlight. The small screen size may make it difficult to see details for people who are a bit far-sighted, but it’s sharp enough as long as you’re comfortable focusing close. This model doesn’t even have a flashing LED to show that it’s on, so you are completely dependent on the LCD screen.

The keys are small and close together, but the feel of the keypad is ok and I don’t find it too difficult to use. Some of the other controls and jacks are not well placed though. The Voice Command button on the lower right side of the phone is awkwardly placed for one-hand operation. The volume rocker would have been better on the right side of the phone instead of the left, so it would fall naturally under the thumb for right-handers. And the headphone/microphone jack also seems out of place on the lower left side – it should have been closer to the top.

The lack of a full qwerty keyboard is always a drawback for a smartphone, as all text has to be tapped out on the small keypad with the usual combination of multiple key-presses for each letter or t9 predictive text entry. The responsiveness of the text entry software is good, but it still gets pretty tedious not having a real keyboard. Whether you find this acceptable or not probably depends on how much text entry you plan to do.

You turn the phone on and off by holding down the End key for a full 3 seconds. You lock the keypad by holding down the Call/Answer key for about 2 seconds, and unlock it by hitting the left menu button (twice if the screen is blanked) and then *. I would prefer a more convenient keypad lock/unlock. Silencing the phone takes a visit to the Profile menu, and it requires some registry editing to silence the WM6 startup sound if you need to turn the phone on in a quiet environment. I’d prefer a more convenient shortcut to silence/un-silence the phone.

Call quality:

Call quality seems good throughout my service area, except for my main complaint with many small phones: the maximum earpiece volume simply isn’t loud enough for noisy environments. I can’t imagine anyone ever using it at less than maximum volume except in a dead-quiet room. The flat earpiece doesn’t help – you have to hunt around for the right position when holding it to your ear, and press it close to get decent volume. A cupped earpiece design might have been better.

The speakerphone isn’t very loud either, but it works if the environment isn’t too noisy. It can be activated by a menu selection, but the shortcut of holding down the Call/Answer button to switch to speakerphone still works as it did on my last WM smartphone although it's not mentioned in the HP manual.

Completing the “not loud enough” circle, the ring volume is barely adequate at maximum, and the vibrate function is too weak to feel if the phone isn’t in direct contact with your body.

Overall I would give the 510/514 only a C- grade as a phone. You can’t see the screen in sunlight, it isn’t loud enough on ring, or talk, or speakerphone, the keypad is small and cramped, and the other controls are poorly placed.

Camera:

The camera lens is on the back of the phone. You turn the camera on by selecting the Camera function in WM6. The minimum shortcut you can set up to take a quick photo if the phone is on the home screen with the keypad unlocked is 3 key presses. You can see a live preview on the screen prior to taking the photo, and you trigger the shutter with the Ok button in the middle of the navigation pad. Photo quality is actually not bad, and there are a good set of photographic controls and options in the software. There’s no flash, but the photos are adequate in normal indoor light. The little convex chrome bit next to the lens is the “self portrait mirror”, although it’s so small you can only see yourself as a dot for aiming. The Video capture is not as good as the still photo capability – the video frame size is small, video tends to be a bit smeared and jerky, and there are few options. Note that video is recorded in 3GP format, requiring a desktop converter program to get it into avi or some other recognizable format.

WiFi/Bluetooth:

The WiFi range and sensitivity may not be as great as devices with bigger and better WiFi antennas, but it’s adequate in most locations. My main complaint is that it can’t seem to remember WiFi keys for encrypted networks reliably. It seems that every second or third time I try to use one of my usual networks at home or at work, the key has been lost and has to be re-typed on the keypad to log on.

If you were expecting to sync your phone wirelessly with your desktop Windows computer, or access Windows network shared folders over the WiFi connection, you will be disappointed. WM6 does not support those functions, except for syncing with corporate MS Exchange servers. What it does work for is internet browsing (although the pocket IE browser is very limited), email (POP3/IMAP/MS Exchange), and VoIP.

Fortunately there is an option for WiFi sync even if you don’t have access to a corporate MS Exchange server: http://www.mail2web.com offers a free online Exchange server which allows you to sync email, calendar and contacts. Interestingly it even allows multiple phones to sync to the same account, giving you a shared online calendar over WiFi/GPRS. The free service doesn’t allow you to sync your online mail2web account directly to your desktop Outlook, but if you plug your phone into USB Activesync and tell it to sync, it will actually do a 3-way sync between the phone, your desktop Outlook, and your mail2web account. The mail2web service also provides the solution to a minor bug with the HP phone: the Voice Command functions to send a voice email work only with an Exchange server – but the mail2web Exchange server works just fine for that purpose.

Apparently ActiveSync can also sync wirelessly via Bluetooth if your PC has a Bluetooth adapter, although I haven't tried it (if I'm that close I figure I can just plug in the USB cable). The phone's Bluetooth interface also supports standard headsets, and keyboards that use the HID profile. I guess a Bluetooth keyboard is one alternative to using the phone keypad, but who's going to bother carrying a Bluetooth keyboard around for their cell phone?

VoIP:

One of the interesting options opened up by having a WiFi interface is to use your phone with a VoIP service, making free or low-cost calls wherever a WiFi connection is available. This does work, but it’s not trivial to set up.

This phone has a built-in VoIP function intended to work with standard SIP connections. HP says that they support it only for some common business office PBX units with a WiFi VoIP interface, but you can set it up to use with other SIP-compliant VoIP services yourself. Strangely you have to configure it using HP’s PC-based configuration software and download it to the phone, rather than configuring it on the phone itself. I tested it with Voipstunt (http://www.voipstunt.com), which offers free calling throughout North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. It worked quite well, although for some reason it always starts the call at an unusable minimum volume level. You can configure the phone to automatically use the VoIP service if available, and the availability status is shown on the phone’s home screen.

Skype would also be an option, except that Skype is not officially supported on this phone with the sub-sized screen, and it won’t install (missing DLLs). Apparently some people have got it to work with a bit of fiddling around, but another option is to use Fring (http://www.fring.com), which does run on this phone and supports Skype along with other voice/text-chat networks. Unfortunately the current version of Fring doesn’t seem to know how to use the earpiece and always uses the speakerphone.

Voice Command:

The headline feature of this phone is Voice Command, a system for speaking simple commands to the phone instead of having to type them out. You just press the Voice Command button on the side of the phone, wait a couple of seconds for the voice prompt, then speak. It works for the usual voice dialing, and for email/messaging functions, locating contacts, and a few other things. Commands must be spoken in a standard form, but it’s speaker-independent, so you don’t have to do any training. It actually works quite well. Ok, the synthesized voice is stilted and artificial, and the pronunciation isn’t the greatest for many names, but it does work. You can correct and save pronunciation for any names which are way off. Unfortunately it’s a bit slow to launch and step through a multi-step command process, and some steps require keyboard intervention anyway. I’d call it more of a gimmick than a really useful feature, but hey, why not?

Media Player:

The phone’s built in pocket Windows Media Player isn’t very fancy, but it will play standard music and video files, although the video experience on the very small screen is never going to be great. It is possible to find alternative media players (like TCPMP) and additional codecs to support other audio/video formats if you feel like going to some trouble to install them.

The stereo earbud headphones provided by HP have reasonable sound, but they are awkward and uncomfortable to wear, with the microphone block badly positioned on an earpiece cable that’s too short. You’ll have to get a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter to plug in better headphones (I got mine from DealExtreme for $1.41 delivered, so it’s not expensive). With better headphones the sound is decent, and the phone has enough power to drive reasonably efficient headphones to adequate volume. It will impact battery life if you use it as a media player though, more so with video and with less efficient headphones, which may be an issue if you are depending on it as a phone.

Software:

The software package on the phone is basically Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 for Smartphones, with only a few very minor extras supplied by HP. I think the best thing I can say about WM6 is that it’s familiar to anyone who has used previous versions. In other words, very little is improved. The one thing I’m most grateful for is that it boots up and shuts down faster than my last WM smartphone, taking about 30 seconds to boot and 10 seconds to shut down.

As with all Windows Mobile devices, you must use Microsoft’s ActiveSync program to communicate with the unit. If you have version 3 or earlier, you must upgrade to version 4, giving up the older version’s WiFi sync capability. ActiveSync supports browsing the folders in the phone’s built-in memory, and syncing the pocket Outlook calendar, contacts and email. Unfortunately ActiveSync no longer supports Backup/Restore with WM6 - apparently Microsoft thinks you should buy a separate utility now. You can switch the HP phone’s USB interface from ActiveSync mode to USB drive mode, which allows your connected PC to access the microSD card (but not the internal memory) as a USB disk drive.

This version of WM6 includes pocket Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But frankly the notion of doing anything with PC Windows documents on the phone’s small screen is ridiculous. Microsoft would do better to put their efforts into fixing problems and improving functionality in other areas of WM.

There is plenty of add-on software available for Windows Mobile, but most of it costs money, usually $20-$30 for the type of small apps or utilities that you could find for free for other operating systems. In my experience there's only about a 50% success rate getting Windows Mobile software to install and run successfully on any specific Windows Mobile device, so try before you buy.

One annoying fault in WM6 for Smartphones is that there is no text select/copy/paste function, which would save a lot of typing in some cases (like the missing WiFi key noted above). I understand that Microsoft has finally gotten around to including this missing functionality in WM6.1, but for users of this phone there is a free utility that works more-or-less: VitoCopyPaste (http://www.smartphone-freeware.com/download-vito-copy-paste.html).

Support:

HP offers a standard 1-year warranty on the phone. There’s a support web site which offers manual and software update downloads, as well as a support forum. There are a few minor patches available to download, but unfortunately no mention of any upgrade to the recently-released Windows Mobile 6.1, and I understand that HP usually doesn't offer such upgrades.