HP's not-for-US iPAQ 614 gets reviewed
There's nothing quite as profoundly unsettling as reading a review about a phone you can't have. For Americans, that's an all-too-common experience -- and thanks to the ongoing Qualcomm / Broadcom drama, even phones that had originally been destined for the colonies have been unceremoniously dropped, destined for regions well beyond the reaches of the legal system. Case in point: HP had originally wanted to bring the interesting iPAQ 610 series here, but backed off at the last second. If you really want one, though, you can still finagle one from an importer -- not to mention that countless Windows Mobile fanatics populate areas of the globe friendlier to HP's latest pocket candy -- so Tracy and Matt's Blog took a close look at the 614c, which is now shipping. Although the reviewer found its Windows Mobile 6 load to be plenty speedy, he also discovered that it was a tad on the chunky side -- not to mention that the 3G radio seemed to be way flaky, the screen is too inset to use entirely stylus-free, and the virtual nav wheel embedded in the keypad (arguably the ace up the 610's sleeve) wasn't much fun to use. Nice try, HP, but on second thought, maybe we're not so broken up that you're keeping it out of the States.













Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fernando @ Mar 18th 2008 10:32PM
lol, United States
Juice @ Mar 18th 2008 10:56PM
Anyone could have seen that the "dpad" implementation was way flawed. WTF. Also they could have easily fit a qwerty in there... They screwed this up big time IMHO. It's hard to find a WinMo pro portrait oriented screen with qwerty/keypad and a decent dpad and screen.
riggs @ Mar 19th 2008 12:01PM
reminds me of the centro
The Edge @ Mar 19th 2008 1:58PM
What happened to the 910 series with the qwerty? I got a prototype and I am looking forward to someone carrying it so I can flash the system. Flaky OS.