Hewlett Packard IPAQ hx4705 Pocket PC

The HP iPAQ hx4700 Series Pocket PC is HP's top of the line Pocket PC. The hx4700/hx4705 PocketPC lists for $649, with the different model numbers designating identical products being distributed through different channels. (I'll use the 4700 and 4705 model numbers interchangeably in this review.)

I don't get too many opportunities to review "state of the art" hardware, as I am doing here. The hx4700 spec's certainly are attention getting, including:

- An absolutely beautiful 4" Transflective VGA TFT color display, which can be easily switched between Landscape and Portrait modes
- Intel PXA270 Processor, 624 MHz!
- Touchpad navigation with mouse-like cursor (a significant departature from previous designs that takes some getting use to)
- WiFi (WLAN 802.11b), Bluetooth and IR communication
- Pocket Informant 5.0 personal information management (PIM), Outlook 2002, Pocket Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Media Player
- Secure Digital (SDIO) and CompactFlash Type II slots
- Magnesium-alloy body
- Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition software for Pocket PC (Premium Edition)
- Removable/rechargeable 1800 mAh Lithiom-Ion battery
- 192mb memory, 64mb ram, 128mb rom (only 85mb available, though)

"In the box" you'll find the iPAQ hx4700 , stylus, Docking station, power adapter, HP/Microsoft software/installation cd, "How Do I?" guide, Quick Start Guide and the usual warranty and safety info..

Appearances

The hx4700 gives the appearance of being extremely solid and well made. The fit and finish is precise, nothing rattles or is even a little loose. The case is gun metal grey, made of magnesium alloy. Black plastic trim enhance the solid workmanlike appearance of the device. The weight, with a compact flashcard is 7.4 ounces, a bit heavier than comparable devices (partly due to the high capacity battery, I think). The docking station is heavy enough to not slide around your desk much, but its smaller than most docking stations I've seen. The pocket PC has a clear flip cover with a flexible hinge, attached to the side of the case, removable. The flip cover has a magnet lock to keep in place. The flexible hinge tends to make the cover want to close, so you have to hold it back to keep it open, though its easy to remove if you want to lay it on your desk, open. The flip cover is clear, so you can see the display, open or closed.

Setup

When you open the box, there's a one page pictoral quick setup guide glued to the bottom of the lid, you can't miss it. There's also a hard copy foldout of the same guide included in the box. Its absolutely essential to install the software first (Activesync 3.7 is included and is required, and most users will want to at least install Outlook 2002), before connecting the PocketPC to the PC. Once the software is installed, and you connect the hx4700 to the PC, you'll setup a partnership between your PC and the hx4700, to ensure important data is sync'd between the PC and the handheld each time you put the PocketPC in the docking station. This all went smoothly for me.

Controls

The hx4700's controls and layout are conventional, with a couple of notable exceptions, the power switch is a bit hard to find and push w/o looking a the unit, and the touchpad control (replacing the D pad) has a bit of a learning curve.

The compactflash and sd slots are on the top of the unit. To the right of these slots are the power button, headphone jack and stylus slot. The power button is a thin bar and slightly recessed. Its almost impossible to hit accidentally, but its occasionally hard to hit when you want to. On the left is the record button. Shaped like the power button, but easier to find without looking, its recessed enough that you won't hit it accidentally, but easy enough to push when you want to. A big improvement over other models, where the record button is easy to activate accidentally.

The battery fits into the back of the unit, locked firmly in place with two latches on the bottom. Also on the bottom is the usb/power connector, reset button, and the IR port.

Above the screen on front are small LED indicators that show when the unit is being charged or if Bluetooth or wifi is turned on. The charging light blinks during charging, stays on solid when charging is complete. On the right is the speaker, of excellent quality, in limited world of PocketPC speakers anyways.

Below the screen is a touchpad about 1/2" inch high and 1" wide. Near each corner of the touchpad is a button nominally for calendar, contacts, mail, and the iTask button. Instead of pushing and releasing a button, if you hold it in for a couple of seconds, it will launch a second task, but defaut, the mail button launches the wireless utility if you keep it pressed. A pretty useful feature if you use your iPAQ a lot. All buttons can be redefined.

The iTask button is new to me, but I like it and use it a lot. Pushing the iTask button launches a menu that includes all running applications, allowing you to switch between app's quickly. (I've always been annoyed by how many taps it takes to switch between applications.) The iTask button also offers one button access to a few utilities, like to switch the screen from portrait to landscape mode, turning off the speaker, and a few others.

The touchpad takes a bit of getting used to. The touch pad can be operated in two modes, cursor or navigation mode. Navigation mode is a lot like using a tab/back tap key on your computer. Pushing the left or right side of the touch pad takes you to the previous or next icon on the screen. The top or bottom of the pad takes you the next item up or down on the screen. To be honest, I don't like navigation mode, I keep overshooting or undershooting what I am trying to get to. In cursor mode, the touchpad works like it does on a lap top, moving your finger around the small cursor area moves the cursor across the screen. I think cursor mode works well. Some how HP got the right balance between sensitivity and accuracy, and I find it very easy, even with the tiny touch pad to move the cursor across the screen and accurately hit the spot I want. Tapping on the touch pad usually selects/launches whatever the cursor is on. Once in a while I doesn't seem to connect, and I need to tap several times, which is frustrating.

The touchpad can make playing some "action" games that were designed to work with a typical PocketPC's D-pad more difficult to play. But I've found other games that I didn't like to play with a D-pad now play pretty well.

The touch pad and dual function buttons allow you to do a lot with your PocketPC without folding back the the screen cover or pulling out the stylus. Its not quite as easy as using a stylus, but not too bad if you want to look up a quick phone number or open a file. The choice to put in a touchpad instead of a D-pad is interesting, I hope I grow more comfortable with it after a few months use. After the first 3 or 4 days, I wanted a D pad back. Now, after a couple weeks, I'm not sure which I'd choose if I had a choice. I'm guessing in a month or I'll be happy and comfortable with the touch pad.

Performance

Performance is, in a word, great.

Wireless Networking

The on board 802.11b wifi adapter works well and is easy to use. I have a Linksys wifi b access point (WAP 11) on my network at home. Connecting to it was a piece of cake, all I had to do was click on a button to turn on the hx4700's wifi adapter, and type in the security key, and I was connected. I find the wireless card to work pretty well, its good enough that I can go outside my home and set in the patio and still connect to my access point about 70 feet through 3 walls away. Anyone who has tried to set up wireless networking on a PocketPC before will truly be impressed with how easy wifi is to use on the hx4700. Bluetooth is included also, but I don't have any Bluetooth devices to test it on.

Display

4" Transflective VGA TFT color display is fantastic. I though the display on my last PocketPC was good, but this one is clearly better. Colors are brighter, text and everything is sharper than I've seen on any pocketpc, and the display is even all across the screen. No dead pixels, blurry spots on the edges, etc, can bee seen. Left and right viewing angles are very good, even when viewing from a 60 degree angle left or right, the screen looks sharp and colors aren't washed out. Viewing angles from below are very good also, about 60-70 degrees, so if you have the hx4700 laying flat on your desk, you won't have any trouble viewing it. Acceptable viewing angles from above are a bit less, past about 45 degrees, the screen tends to darken.

The brighteness settings can be adjusted with an infinitely variable slider. The backlight needs to be turned on to be able to see the screen in all but the brightest of lighting situations. I find the 50% setting to be more than adequate for all indoor lighting. In full sunlight, the screen is very readable w/o backlighting, but as you move from sunlight to shadow it becomes very difficult to see without the backlight on full.

Landscape mode is easy to switch to, and it works with just about every application I've tried. Some games just aren't designed for landscape mode, and won't even "switch" but most applications will.

Battery Life

Battery life (the included battery is rated for 1800 mahr!) is good I used a battery benchmark program from Spb Software (www.spbsoftwarehouse.com), which measured the battery life with normal load and the backlight set at the middle setting (which is still brighter and easier to see than the screen on the Toshiba e755 or Dell Axim X5 at full brightness) To do this, the Spb Benchmark periodically opens Pocket Word, loads a document and closes Pocket Word to emulate normal Pocket PC usage. Under these conditions, and with a compactflash card installed (to better simulate real world use), it took about 6 hours and 10 minutes to fully drain the battery on this PocketPC. With Wifi turned on while opening and closing word documents, battery life dropped to a still very respectable 5 hours and 9 minutes. If you're just using the hx4700 to listen to music, with the volume set at a comfortably loud 3 (out of 6), with the backlight off, battery life is more than 9 hours.

The hx4700 and Windows mobile 2003 offer most of the battery saving options you'd expect, and a few more. The backlight will turn off after a user defineable time period (10 seconds to 5 minutes) without any input, as will the device itself. The brightness level is infinititely adjustable to allow to tweak the brightness to no more than necessary, and it can be set to automatically adjust to the environment. When you turn a PocketPC off, it doesn't really turn off completely, it goes into "standby" mode, where power is kept on the ram, keeping intact any programs are running and keeping the buttons active. If you intend to not use your PocketPC for several days or weeks, you can also set it so it drops out of Standby mode into a lower powersaving mode after 1-4 days. Only the power button can be used to come out of this mode. There is also a "lock" for standby mode, keeping any button from accidentally turning the pocketpc on, say when it is placed in a briefcase, to minimize the risk of accidentally draining the battery. As best I can tell there is no option to cut back the cpu speed, as there is on the Toshiba e755, perhaps because this option only improved battery life slightly.

The battery pack is removable, and can easily be removed. Swapping out the battery causes only a soft reset, so you can carry an extra battery on a trip, swap it out, and not lose data. An optional 3600mah battery is available ($130 on HP's website).

Multimedia

With the stereo headphone jack, windows media player 9, and a good sized flash memory card, the hx4700 serves as more than passable portable media player. player. Sound quality from a good set of headphones is very good, with a very respectable maximum volume, much better than previous Pocket PC's I've owned. With headphones, you could listen to the hx4700 while riding a noisy bus or in a room full of people. Even listening to recordings using the built in speaker in a not too noisy room is very workable, though the audio quality of a speaker this small isn't really a good fit for listening to music. Spoken words are easy to understand and hear. Whether using the headphones or the speaker, the the hx4700's audio capabilities are much stonger than the Toshibe e740 and e755 or Dell Axim X5 that I've used previously.

Initially, when listening to tunes with a good set of headphones, frequency response seemed to be lacking just a slight bit, bass seems a slightly weak when I compared tunes played on the hx4700 and my Zen micro mp3 player. While Windows media player doesn't have an equalizer built in to adjust the relative playback of different frequencies, there is a five band equalizer in iPAQ audio tool installed on this PocketPC, with five presets (Rock, Classical, Voice, Jazz, Dance and flat). You can also save your own equalization profile. With the right equalizer settings, I find the audio to be very much on par with a good mp3 player. The iPAQ audio tool also includes a switch to turn automatic gain control on or off, and if its off, there is a slide adjustment to set the microphone sensitivity . I'm very impressed with the audio capabilities of the hx4700, and few users will be disappointed when listening to audio files. Audio quality and volume are excellent.

Using this PocketPC as a portable video makes a lot of sense, at least at first glance, given the high quality display featured on this PocketPC. And if you're willing to work at it a little, it is a terrific portable video player. Windows Mobile 2003 includes a pocketPC version of Windows media player 9, which will play video files in the wmv (windows media format). And Windows Movie Maker (or Windows Media Encoder) , part of windows XP, can be used to convert just about any non copy protected video file to the wmv format. One of the encode settings you can choose in Windows Media Encoder is specifically setup for PocketPC's, and can be used to create 320X240 resolution (quarter vga or QVGA) with a bit rate of 218kbs. A 44 minute video, about what you'd have if you recorded a 1 hour TV show w/o the commercials, works out to be about a 73 mb file, small enough to fit 6 or 7 on a 512mb compact flash card, providing 4 or 5 hours of entertainment on a trip.

On my older Toshiba PocketPC, these 320X240 (qvga( resolution files worked well, and looked fine when played back full screen in landscape mode on a PocketPC using Windows Media Player. The video resolution matched the screen resolution, which, like almost all other PocketPC's, was also qvga, requiring no interpolation for full screen playback. To playback these qvga video's on my new hx4700, which has a full vga (640 X 480) resolution screen, would mean that the PocketPC's media player would have to interpolate the video to fill the vga resolution. I assumed this would be no problem, but I was wrong, qvga videos can only be played back as qvga, meaning they played back in a window that was one quarter of the screen, too small to enjoy. The HP website confirmed that Mobile windows media player would not interpolate video's to play full screen.

I could just encode video's to VGA resolution, and I'm sure they'd look great, but they would also be larger files, and they'd take longer to encode. Fortunately, I found an excellent (currently) freeware player for PocketPC's that addresses this problem, called BetaPlayer. This player supports MPG, DivX, XViD, and WMV video files, mp3, wav, wma, ogg, aac audio files and a few other formats. The player is still in development, but seems really solid on the hx4700. I've tried full screen playback of a lot of different video that I've recorded and they look fantastic on the hx4700, colors are significantly brighter and more vivid than other PocketPC's.

I've noticed that Microsoft has released version 10 of their Windows mobile media player, according to their website (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/windowsmobile/default.aspx). Though some companies have released version 10 for their PocketPC's (like Dell), HP has yet to make this version for the hx4700. I hope they do, but since HP is billing this as more of a business device than a multimedia device, I'm not sure it will happen.

The onboard microphone works well also. I started a recording during a meeting with a half dozen people present and few others participating by speakerphone. I started the recorder, and set the pocketPC near the speaker phone. The meeting lasted 20 minutes. When I played the recording back, I could hear every voice clearly and had an accurate record of the proceeding, in the form of a 10mb wav file, (8 bit with a 11khz sampling rate). I've tested this further, and it appears that the longest recording you can make is about 25 minutes, after which you need to start a new recording.

Compatibility

I have installed all of the applications I'd owned previously , including Laridian's PocketBible, several games (Interstellar Flames, Pop's Pipes, Netwalk, Slurp, Lemonade), PocketTV, BetaPlayer and a few others. All have worked as expected. So far I've not run into any compatibility problems.

Application Performance

With apologies to Larry Niven, I'll start this discussion with my "Cautionary Tale". When I first turned on the hx4700, I was impressed with how fast it was. The programs list popped up quick when I tapped start. All programs started quickly. I could run applications and play music at the same time without a hitch. Video's played back smoothly. But after a week of use, it seemed slower to me. Turns out, at least in part, it was slower, and in part, I was just getting used to it. Over the first few days of use, I installed all the PocketPC software I had, plus a couple of new video players, a benchmark program, and a few other programs, to really put the hx 4700 through its paces. I also used the microphone to make some large recordings (one over 40 minutes long, as mentioned above). I let all these programs install and files save in the default location, which was a mistake

Once when I put the PocketPC on the docking station, it gave me an error asking me to quit another application, so Activesync could load. Only this one application was running, how could I have run out of memory?

As mentioned at the top, this PocketPC has 64mb of ram, and 128mb of rom memory. The ram memory "clears" whenever you "hard reboot" the PocketPC or when you completely loose power. Stuff in rom memory stays even if power is completely lost. Whenever you launch a program, it loads into ram and runs from there. It stays there until you force the program to quit. When you install software, the default install location is in ram. When I added image files for the dockware calendar/sceensaver, the were saved to ram. The voice recordings were saved in ram. So I eventually go to the point were I had very little ram left to run applications. This slowed the system a noticeable amount, menus were slightly slower to pop up, etc, nothing earth shattering, but the device didn't feel fast. I finally understood, moved the applications and data files to rom, and now my system is snappy again. End of story.

I installed Spb Benchmark to put the hx4700 through its paces. I've compared the results below with my Toshiba e755, a last generation PocketPC.

Spb Benchmark Data (Higher numbers indicate better performance):

Spb Overall rating ( reflects the overall performance of your Pocket PC hardware. It ....takes into account the performance of CPU, memory, file and video systems. )
Hx4700, w/cpu @623mhz WM2003 2nd ed. 1645
e750/e755 w/cpu @400 mhz, WM2003: 1226
e750/e755 w/cpu @200 mhz, WM2003: 797

CPU index (measures processor performance)
Hx4700, w/cpu @623mhz WM2003 2nd ed. 2408
e750/e755 w/cpu @400 mhz, WM2003: 1841
e750/e755 w/cpu @200 mhz, WM2003: 1059

Graphics index (reflects the performance of the Pocket PC's video subsystem)
Hx4700, w/cpu @623mhz WM2003 2nd ed. 1031
e750/e755 w/cpu @400 mhz, WM2003: 692
e750/e755 w/cpu @200 mhz, WM2003: 643

File system index(reflects the performance of the internal file system, not affected by speed of flash cards or total memory)
Hx4700, w/cpu @623mhz WM2003 2nd ed. 1407
e750/e755 w/cpu @400 mhz, WM2003: 1122
e750/e755 w/cpu @200 mhz, WM2003: 659

Platform Index (reflects the overall performance of the operating system .... and built in applications like Pocket Word)
Hx4700, w/cpu @623mhz WM2003 2nd ed. 1330
e750/e755 w/cpu @400 mhz, WM2003: 1095
e750/e755 w/cpu @200 mhz, WM2003: 807

Higher numbers indicate better performance, for more info on how the numbers are calculated go here: http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/benchmark/index_description.html

For the most part, these numbers are state of the art, except for the graphics index. There are several PocketPC's that can provide better graphics scores, though all have 320X240 resolution screens, with a fourth the pixels to manipulate. To some degree the lower scores may be an indicator of the different types of screens rather than an actual performance difference, and, since the Graphics index is included in the Overall rating calc's, it also causes overall rating to be understated. Still, these benchmarks are the most widely used, so I've included them here for comparison. Note that they aren't really designed to compare devices with 320 X 240 to devices with 640 X 480 resolution screens.

Included Utilities and Software

In addition to Outlook 2002 and Activesync, the hx4700 comes with a few interesting utilities, not specatular, but not throwaways either. These are in addition to Mobile Windows 2003, which includes versions of several of the desktop programs we are accustomed to using. The Pocket versions of Excel, Word, Internet Explorer and other "Windows" applications are "lite" versions of their PC brethren. You can read files created with the PC versions on the PocketPC and vice versa, though most advanced features are missing. For example, Pocket Excel spreadsheets are only page, and there's no graphing capability. Pocket Windows media player doesn't have a screen saver like Windows Medial Player for the PC, and the pocket version doesn't support the same range of video formats as the PC windows version does (it supports wmv). But if you keep the limitations in mind, the PocketPC versions are very useful. I put copies of key word documents (technical reports, memo's, etc) on my PocketPC when I go on trips. I keep spreadsheets with the technical calc's related to current projects on the PocketPC so that I can quickly check progress or unexpected changes at any time.

Dockware is one of the extra utilities I enjoy. When the PocketPC is in the charging cradle, the backlight turns on after a couple minutes and a calendar and digital clock is displayed. Any images in the "my pictures" directory on the PocketPC are displayed as wallpaper behind the calendar, switching every few seconds. I've created a small versions of several images of my children, pets, and from the recent holidays and loaded them on the PocketPC and they "play" whenever the PocketPC is charging.

TodayPanel Lite adds four icons to the "TODAY" screen (think desktop), battery status, main memory, storage card memory, and backlite, all critical numbers to how you use your PocketPC. The backlite icon has a small slider which allows you to quickly adjust the brightness without digging into the menus. The memory icons one touch access to whats running, and how you are using the main memory, the rom memory and installed flash cards.

HP Image Zone.... Given the high quality display on this screen, you'll want to use it to view image files. Image zone is a really nice utility, allows you to view images quickly, zoom in and out quickly, view images in slide show style, etc.

Pocket Informant
If you don't like Outlook, Pocket Informant offers a powerful package of features that looks promising, though I haven't tried it yet.

HP ProtectTools
This allows users to password protect their data, even after a hard reset.

Clearview PDF and Presentation Viewer
Basic PDF and PowerPoint viewers.

Avantgo
Downloads specially formatted web pages from your choice of many websites to your PocketPC. I get web pages from CNET, Business Week, Forbes, MSNBC, NY Times, PC World, Reuters, Sporting News, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal transferred to my PocketPC everyday. Up to 2mb of data is free.

Trial versions of several other interesting programs are also included.

Support

The HP website includes a fair amount of information, spec sheets, manuals, driver downloads, and support forums. I wish a hard copy of the main manual was included, though the PDF version is just adequate. It explains the basics, but not the details, like how to best manage the memory to maximize performance. The hx4700 comes with a 1 year warranty.

Summary

The hx4700 is a joy to use. Performance is great, the screen is fantastic, and the feature set is unsurpassed. If you can afford the price, you'll get a PDA that won't disappoint.

Thanks, Epinions!


ActiveSync Version 3.7
Windows Mobile 2003, 2nd Edition