hw6915 review

HP's hw6915 is the first smartphone we've seen with a full QWERTY keyboard and GPS navigation software.

The hw6915 is about the same size as a normal PDA, but due to the space taken up by the keypad it has a square 240x240-resolution screen rather than the rectangular 240x320 screen found on most PDAs. This isn't a problem most of the time, but the low vertical resolution means you have to do more scrolling up and down when viewing websites.

Like a BlackBerry handset, the hw6915 can be used as a phone. It's heavy at 175g, so a Bluetooth headset is a good idea for long phone calls. Call quality is reasonable, but recipients of calls complained that the caller sounded distant and indistinct.

Typing messages using the keyboard is easy. The keys are small and responsive, apart from the creaky spacebar. The handset supports POP3 and IMAP4 email. Unlike BlackBerry phones or Nokia's E61 (see 'Also consider...', below right), it isn't possible to associate a normal email account with the handset and have messages delivered automatically as soon as they arrive using Push email. Instead, you must have a Microsoft Exchange server and configure it to Push email, so this feature is useful only for businesses.

Like all Windows Mobile 5 PDA smartphones, the hw6915 has built-in editors for Microsoft Word and Excel documents, as well as Pocket Internet Explorer. Pocket IE is a competent mobile browser that can reformat webpages automatically into a single column or leave them in their original format. The hw6915 is powerful enough to scroll smoothly around graphics-heavy pages, but the screen's low resolution means only small sections of pages can be displayed at a time. We would have preferred a 640x480-resolution screen.

It's easy to get the hw6915 connected to the internet, as it has built-in wireless networking. HP has sensibly installed its own wireless connection software, which is far easier to use than the Windows Mobile utility. If you're nowhere near a hotspot, you can connect using GPRS, but the hw6915 doesn't support faster 3G connections.

The handset also comes with TomTom's GPS navigation software installed. This has been available on Windows Mobile 5 PDAs for a while, but the hw6915 has a built-in GPS receiver so navigating is as simple as loading the software and waiting for a GPS fix. The TomTom software is one of our favourites, but the hw6915 version has no maps. You can download maps for one city for free, but ones for the whole of the UK and Ireland cost extra.

HP's hw6915 is great for messaging and so packed with features you shouldn't need to carry around any other gadgets. It could do with a higher-resolution screen and more versatile Push email, but it's a good buy on contract.