.: Big review of HP iPAQ h4150

Author - Pavel Koza :: User rating -   (588 votes) :: Views - 85673 November 12, 2003 :: With the growing volume of PDA sales, new models hit the shelves more and more often. HP seems to be the most agile in this respect, offering a new model every three months lately. After uhe 1900, 2200 and 5500 series, it has come up with a brand new line 4100, which offers excellent communication options packed in a tiny device. Here, I review h4150 and if you would like to find out how this dwarf did in comparison with the robust h5550, don't hesitate and read on.

When I recently reviewed HP iPAQ h5550 (not translated yet, sorry), I remarked that it was a pity for such a great power to be placed in an extremely large case. Well, it's the end of the year 2003 and past are the times when pocket computers weighed 200 grams on average... It did not take very long before I obtained a brand new model with the same parameters as h5550 but the size of h1940. Its name is HP iPAQ h4150 and it is already being sold in many countries worldwide. Can't believe? Well, read on:) I'd like to thank HP for providing the device for review purposes before an official launch of the product.

We should add that besides the device I reviewed, the h4000 series includes the model h4350, which is the first iPAQ with an integrated keyboard! Unfortunately, HP does not plan to introduce it to the tiny Czech market for the time being... I'll d my best to get hold of one to review it, because it is so exceptional a model that I simply cannot miss it.

What is in the box?

There is no point in examining a colour box, because you'll throw it away after opening it, anyway, but not before taking out the contents, of course. However, there is one thing worth mentioning - on the inside of the cover, there is a warning that you need to install ActiveSync first before connecting the Pocket PC to a desktop PC. The colour and size of the warning ensure that nobody misses it. If someone does, the same warning is on a band over the USB cradle.

• PDA HP iPAQ h4150
• Li-Ion battery 1000mAh
• AC power source with an adapter for direct charging of the device
• Synchronisation USB cradle with an slot for an extra battery
• Protective case
• Extra stylus
• CD-ROM with Outlook 2002 and bonus apps
• Quick start guide
• Warranty card
• Leaflet with a list of optional accessories
• Other documents that nobody reads

Besides the device, which I'll deal with later, the box contains many other interesting things. The battery is separate, which implies it is replaceable. As usual ion HP devices, the power source is one piece whose connector can be plugged either in the cradle or directly to the device with an adapter.

The cradle is very interesting. Forget about futuristic silver design, here comes a futuristic grey design:) There is no point in trying to find the right words to describe the cradle, instead, I suggest you take a look at the photos. You may wonder what the purpose of the L-shaped part is - it is an adapter for charging an extra battery. The cradle is common to the whole h4000 series, therefore it can accommodate accumulators of four different capacities. You will appreciate the "strange" slant of the cradle when you need to replace the spare battery but avoid disrupting the iPAQ. Besides, as far as I know, this is the first iPAQ cradle to have a detachable USB cable. It is definitely much more convenient that a fixed cable. The cable used here is a standard USB A-B cable, so that you can easily replace it with a longer one should you find the original cable too short.

Hardly anyone uses the iPAQ in place only, the vast majority of users carry their device around. In order to avoid damage, the manufacturer supplies a protective case. It is the same as that shipping with h2210, which made me frown when I saw that - in a few weeks, its sharp inside edges scratched the rubber sides of my h2210. Fortunately, the h4150 has nothing like that to be scratched. HP supplies a spare stylus, which is positive.

And finally, there is the CD-ROM and various documents. As usual, the CD contains several basic and bonus applications. The documents include a user guide, warranty information, a list of available accessories and the EULA.

To sum up, the box contains everything you may wish for such a device. For those who find this insufficient, there is a wide offer of other accessories you can buy extra.

Design

It is nice to watch manufacturers squeeze an increasingly powerful devices into ever-smaller cases. The difference between iPAQ h4150 and the tiny models iPAQ h1915 or h1940, is insignificant: the dimensions of h4150 are 70.6 x 113.6 x 13.5 millimetres (virtually identical with h1900). The weight is 132 grams, which represents a 10-percent increase. It looks extremely elegant and fragile, but don't worry, it is most likely made of hardy plastic. Comparing the two models, h4150 has a different layout of the front panel, the infra port and sound record button are located differently, and last but not least, the middle and back parts have different colour.

Now, the design in detail and let's start as usual with the front panel with display and control buttons. The display occupies most of the front panel. Over the display, there is the main switch and a LED indicator on either side of the button. The left one blinks blue and green to indicate Bluetooth and Wi-Fi activity, respectively. The right one is green and orange to indicate charging status and notify of various events. Under the display, there is a square four-way control pad with a separate push button in the middle. There are two user-definable buttons on the left and right of the pad - by default Calendar and Contacts on the left and Mail and iTask on the right. The device offers a convenient feature to block the buttons so that they do not react when in sleep mode.

There is nothing interesting on the back but for the battery compartment.

On the top, there is a standard 3.5 mm stereo headphones jack, a microphone pinhole, an SD/MMC slot with a dummy card, and a stylus shaft. Don't get confused by the absence of a Wi-Fi antenna - it's integrated. On the left, there is a sound record button (user configurable) and a small hole for soft reset. There is nothing interesting on the other side, just a safety latch against accidental opening of the battery compartment. Finally, the bottom side: it hosts a usual 22-pin connector (fully compatible with the h2000 and h3000 series - h3800 and h3900 to be more specific - and h5000 series, so that you can use all the various accessories without any problem). Besides the connector is a somewhat unusually located infra port.

Parameters

We can only speculate about the reasons but unlike h1940, this device is powered by an Intel processor - more specifically the PXA255 also known as XScale. It runs at the highest frequency, i.e. 400 MHz, and there is no software tool to slow it down (not from HP). There are 64 MB of RAM to store applications and data (56.77 MB available), the operating system is stored in a 32 MB FlashROM. Part of the FlashROM is reserved as iPAQ File Store with a capacity of 2.85 MB, so that you don't need to worry about your most important data in the event that the battery runs completely dry. Let me add that the flash memory is not from Intel but M-Systems. That on itself is nothing unusual, except for benchmarks showing that this type of memory is 2.5 times faster than that in h2210, which is a remarkable difference. This iPAQ is also the first to offer an utility for formatting the freely available FlashROM memory. It is by no means useless, although it may seem so - some users have reported problems with the FlashROM disk and formatting such space is nothing simple.

Now, the display. From the technical point of view, it is a transflexive display 88.9 mm in diameter. The resolution is a standard 240 x 320 pixels, 65 k colours. Unfortunately, the display has much in common with that of h1940, so that I cannot avoid having some minor objections. Besides wide black borders (some 1 mm wider on each side as compared to iPAQ h1915), there is a yellow tint, which is quite apparent especially when looking from below. The less slanted view, the less intensive the yellow tint is. When looking at the display perpendicularly, there virtually none. Most likely, this is a "characteristic" of this type of backlight, which we will probably have to get used to in HP devices:( Having said that, I must stress that it does not play any role in normal usage, only faultfinders, such as myself, will grumble:) Except for the problem with the yellow colour, the display is absolutely flawless. The image is sharp and clear, you can set backlight intensity at five different levels. This model, too, has the ClearType feature available in all applications and offers ClearType Tuner for fine-tuning the settings. Nothing special to say about the touch layer, either - it works exactly as it is supposed to work.

As far as audio features are concerned, this iPAQ offers the best money can buy. Not only is the noise level very low, but the device also offers an incredibly well-done control panel for sound recording and playback. You can set headphones volume level separately for each channel at three levels and apply a software equaliser. This allows for bass and treble adjustment at 4 levels plus the Super Bass feature for heavy stuff. There are three modes for sound recording - dictaphone (you speak directly to the microphone), normal and conference (maximum sensitivity). It really works, so that you can forget about that power-hungry tape recorder. The use of a standard 3.5 mm jack for audio output is quite convenient - you need no adapter for your quality headphones. A loudspeaker is hidden behind the control pad, offering acceptable sound quality.

Communication capabilities make iPAQ h4150 an absolute king in its category. Besides standard USB and IrDA communication, it has an integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth! This is truly remarkable given the small size of the device. A special applications makes controlling individual communication interfaces extremely easy - you can switch them on and off in a matter of seconds. While the Wi-Fi can be configured very easily due to Windows Mobile 2003's own Zero Configuration Wizard, the Bluetooth requires more effort. For that, you have an excellent Bluetooth Manager, well-known to all users of BT-enabled iPAQs. You can easily connect the iPAQ with a mobile phone, printer or laptop. Having the iPAQ for 48 hours only, I did not have time to test Wi-Fi and BT properly, but I am almost sure that it does not suffer from the same problem as h5450. Let me just add that h4150 offers LEAP for Wi-Fi and that users who need to connect to corporate networks will use L2TP VPN or Enrollment tool for certificates.

The integrated BT and Wi-Fi require as powerful a battery as possible. As I have already mentioned, the main battery is rechargeable and replaceable. Specifically, it is a 1000-mAh Lithium-Ion battery. If you need more power, you can buy a spare battery of the same capacity or 1800-mAh one. When replacing the main battery or when it runs completely dry, an integrated NiMH backup battery preserves data in the RAM. I tested battery life with a maximum backlight and an application simulating common user activity. I fully discharged and charged the battery twice prior to the test. The iPAQ lasted for 4 hours and 17 minutes. Considered this was a new device, it is possible that it would last longer after a few more charge-discharge cycles. One of the main power consumers is the Wi-Fi transceiver. This iPAQ makes it possible to set consumption at three levels, but at the expense of data transfer speed.

Expandability

Even though it does not have to occur to you initially, you may later find your self in a situation when the integrated features no longer suffice to satisfy your needs. First problem will probably be a lack of storage space for your apps and data. A solution is at hand - SD cards are nowadays available with capacities of hundreds of megabytes, gigabytes are expected to hit the shelves in a matter of a few months. So, all you need to do is to buy a sufficient memory card (if you need just the basic range of capacities, an MMC card will do) and there you go. You can use I/O cards (such as the new GPS card), too, because iPAQ h4150 fully supports the SDIO standard.

Another option is to use Bluetooth-enabled peripherals. Besides the usual ones, such as mobile phones and printers, you will most likely use this fature with new GPS modules that can turn the iPAQ into a powerful navigation system. The number of accessories and peripheral devices that support Bluetooth has been growing steadily and will surely continue to grow.

The last option is the data connector located on the bottom side of the device. You will use it mostly for connecting an external keyboard, be it the miniature plug-in type or the large, foldable one. On the other hand, owners of various iPAQ jackets will be disappointed because there is no way to connect them because of the absence of the large data connector (due to the small size of the device).

Software

This iPAQ, too, ships with some extra apps in the ROM and on the CD-ROM on top of the standard installation of Windows Mobile 2003 Premium Edition. If you are new to Pocket PC and would like to learn more about the standard apps supplied by Microsoft, I would recommend the article What’s new in Pocket PC 2003?. For those of you who do have some idea, I'll just add that the ROM contains a backup utility called iPAQ Backup, an image viewer iPAQ Image Zone, a standard task manager iTask, control panel iPAQ Wireless and a few other applets in Settings.

Let's start with iPAQ Backup, because backing up data is one of the most important activities that every computer users should carry out as often as possible. Basically, it the old familiar programme that has undergone some improvements. The initial screen will give you basic information about the application. Then you specify what type of data you want to back up - documents, databases, system files, registries etc. Then you tap on the Backup button and in a few seconds, the backup is done to any memory space selected. The restorre procedure is equally simple. The iPAQ Backup has some cool features, such as automatic backup at a specific time or when battery power decreases under a certain limit, or backup of calendar and contacts into iPAQ File Store. This application is really superb!

Instead of iPAQ Image Viewer this device comes with a much better application pre-installed, the iPAQ Image Zone. This is a fast and feature-packed applications to be appreciated not only by digital photography fans. You can easily view all images in one folder, send an image by e-mail or to another device, print it (after installing HP iPAQ Printing) etc. A slideshow option is a matter-of-course (there are several dozen different morphing styles), you can add sound recording, some may want to use Histogram... There are quite a few features.

Finally, there is iTask, a simple task manager. There was no space for more apps in the ROM, I should mention perhaps Self-Test, which will help you test the device for faults.

HP surprised me nicely when I was browsing the CR-ROM and discovered a list of all the apps supplied, including information about its status - free, trial or full. There are quite a lot of applications on the CD, but they are mostly trial versions or freeware utilities. The only exceptions are a presentation utility called iPresentation Mobile Converter LE, which can display Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and an encryption utility called F-Secure FileCrypto for Pocket PC. If you expected iPAQ Software Choice, you'll be disappointed - the option to choose software to your liking is not available at all for this model.

Pricing

According to the HP.com, the price for this device is set to U.S.$449. Given the features and parameters, this is a very good value for the money. Anyhow, if you need both an integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support you don't have much choice, do you? :)

Benchamrks

I use Spb Benchmark for a complete performance test. I have already reviewed a few new Pocket PCs and I am planning to eventually compare them with each other. If you are interested in the full results, the complete .XML file is available for download here :: HP iPAQ h4150 (2003, 400MHz) [1KB] . If you copy the contents of the file to the form on this page (click on Add device), you can compare the results with other devices.

More links

• HP iPAQ h4150 main page
• Detailed specification of the device
• Comments from users, add yours
• Purchase at my store

Conclusion I am glad that I can once again declare that I was honoured the pleasure of testing one of the best Pocket PCs on the market. Of course, I should stress that I had only two days to review it, yet the device impressed me. Putting aside the minor weakness of the display, this is what I call a perfect device. Many people will compare it to h5550, which is better in some respects but lags behind the new device overall. I am not talking about the size but the new device is at a higher level generally, especially in details. For a good price, you get one of the smallest yet most powerful devices money can buy. It is great success for HP to squeeze BT and Wi-Fi into the tiny shell. Add countless convenient little features (control panels, integrated antenna etc.) - this device must satisfy even the most discerning customers. :: The final rating is 93%

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