Geeks.com is selling the HP iPAQ h2210 for less than $220 this week, with a... 3600 mAh extra battery and a 128 MB SD card. While this model is pretty old now it is still very capable with its 400 Mhz processor and so we thought that we could review it from the point of view of an affordable SIP phone (Ekiga, Gizmo, Stanaphone, FreeWorldDialup, Skype). Read more for our findings and a quick rundown of its amazing battery life times!Description
The iPaq h2210 was released about 2.8 years ago and it is running the PocketPC 2003 OS (preloaded with the latest ROM version 1.10) with the addition of Pocket Word/Excel. It runs on a PXA255 Intel CPU at 400 Mhz, it has 64 MBs of RAM (50 MBs available to the user) and 32 MBs of storage (3.8 MBs available to the user). It uses a QVGA 3.5" transflective TFT (brighter than Dell's Axim X5 model which was released around the same time in 2003). The device also includes IrDA, Bluetooth 1.1 from Windcom (now Broadcomm), an SD/SDIO slot, and a compact flash slot. The device connects to the PC via a USB cable and it also has a cradle. The cradle can charge the PDA and an additional 900 mAh battery, but not the 3600 mAh one which is too big to fit on the cradle. The PDA does not have WiFi support, but we used our ($35) Linksys WiFi CF card to complete the tests. The PDA also features a 3.5mm headphone jack and an integrated microphone. We found its stylus hefty and easy to grab. The h2210 is rubberized on its two sides for a better grip. We found the four buttons at the bottom easy to click and the 5-way joystick is easy to use and precise.
Performance
The PDA that it would be fair to compare to because it was released at a similar time and because it's using the same CPU, is the Dell Axim X5-Advanced. Having used both devices with the PPC2003 operating system I can truthfully say that the h2210 is a much faster device. Not only does it use faster RAM (and boots in about 14 seconds), but videos are not dropping frames as they do on the Axim X5 (e.g. when using QVGA WMV videos with either Windows Media Player or TCPMP in landscape mode). We found the h2210 on par with the rx3115 PDA which uses the (newer, technologically-speaking) 300 Mhz Samsung CPU.
Goodies
The device's leading mobile feature is probably its Bluetooth software which worked very well with the devices we paired it with. We could exchange files and even use a mobile phone as a modem to leach its GPRS connection. The exact same success we had by using IrDA too (we used a Sony Ericsson K300 phone and we got the PDA to the internet via IrDA at around 7 KB/sec).
The Geeks.com offer also comes with a 128 MB HP-branded SD card. If you only want to install applications and have some pictures in it, then 128 MBs is enough for you. If you want to watch full movies though, or listen to music, we advise you buy 1 or 2 GBs SD cards. We tested the PDA with our 1 GB Sandisk card and it worked perfectly too.
On the software side HP has included a few nice applications in there, like Nevo, which allows you to control your HiFi/TV devices via CIR ("Consumer Infrared"). Read here for some pictures of Nevo from a previous HP iPaq review. Other HP-only goodies include the HP Image Viewer, HP Printing, and the non-working HP Backup (more on this below). HP has also touched-up a number of Setting panels over the default Windows ones.
- "PDAs for VoIP, Page 1/2"
- "PDAs for VoIP, Page 2/2"
