14 DAY TRIAL // Many of you may not know Hewlett Packard as a cellphone manufacturing company probably due to the fact that it is the number 1 ranking company in worldwide personal computer shipments and this surely makes its mobile phone business not such a big deal.
HP has started meddling with the mobile phone business since the acquisition of Compaq, the ones that were making the iPAQ line of handhelds. These Pocket PCs run Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system and are the main competition to the Palm handsets.
The handset that HP has just launched at the 3GSM conference, the HP iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger, will run the Windows Mobile 6 Standard OS and will target the Smartphone mobile market.
The quad-band GSM/EDGE device features Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g connectivity, VoIP capabilities, a 220 x 176 pixels display, 128MB ROM and 64 MB RAM memory, Bluetooth 1.2, a microSD memory expansion card slot and a TI OMAP850 processor running at 200 MHz.
Instead of being a handheld with a full QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen, the iPAQ 510 is the first handset HP has ever released in the form of a traditional candybar cellphone with a keypad.
It also sports over-the-air management by leveraging technology from the recent Bitfone acquisition by HP, a technology giving the users the possibility to remotely delete data on the handset or even install updates over the air.
The handset will also provide its users with a Voice Commander feature enabling them to initiate actions on the phone and navigate through the iPAQ's menu. Its text-to-speech technology will permit you to read your e-mails while driving and even respond by sending a voice recording.
The spec sheet also contains a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, a VoIP client that will let you take advantage of the built-in Wi-Fi, core Office applications, Windows Media Player, a talk time of up to 6.5 hours and a stand-by of about 260 hours.
The iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger will arrive on the mobile market during this spring and the price HP has mentioned will be in the 300 - 350 $ range.