HP iPAQ 912c: one smartphone with outstanding battery life

Remember the halcyon days of HP’s iPAQ range, when it ruled the roost of personal digital assistants? HP hasn’t seen the same sort of success in the smartphone market, although with every new iPAQ release we’re hopeful that it’ll bring the brand back to the top of the heap.

It’s with this fresh-eyed optimism that we look at the latest HP smartphone, the iPAQ 912c Business Messenger. Its title gives it away as a device destined for the enterprise rather than consumers, but, even without that, the BlackBerry-style QWERTY thumbboard is a dead giveaway.

Design

It’s obvious the iPAQ 912c has been designed more for function rather than fashion. HP has made some token efforts at style with the gloss black front, chrome frame and matching chrome frets between the rows on the keyboard, but overall it looks more like a ruggedised handheld with a fancy dress on – an impression that’s upheld by the rubber stoppers covering all the slots and ports on the sides. Measuring 114 x 64 x 15mm, its dimensions are almost identical to the BlackBerry Bold, but it’s a lot heavier at 154g.

Compared to the HTC Touch 3G that we also reviewed this month (another Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone), the HP iPAQ 912c looks positively mammoth, but its girth is forgivable for two reasons: the full QWERTY thumbboard and the massive 1,940mAh battery (which we’ll cover further under Performance).



One thing the iPAQ 912c doesn’t lack is input options. In addition to the 2.4in touchscreen display (used in tandem with the full-sized telescoping stylus), there’s a strip of buttons below the screen for accessing the soft keys and triggering the Start menu and OK button, as well as the usual five-way controller. The right-hand side houses a mechanical scrollwheel – the likes of which we haven’t seen in a Windows Mobile device for awhile – and another OK button.

This abundance of buttons means you can get away with hardly using the touchscreen at all, which overall makes the iPAQ 912c more efficient to use, as you don’t have to fiddle with the stylus and on-screen buttons.

The built-in keyboard puts the iPAQ 912c in good stead to compete against the BlackBerrys of the world, but the typing experience isn’t quite as good as we were hoping for. While it’s the same width as the BlackBerry Bold – which has the best keyboard we’ve ever used on a non-slider smartphone – the domed tops on the keys make it feel more cramped than it actually is, and feedback is a little stiff. Also, unlike on the BlackBerry, there’s no system-wide spell-check or error correction, so the typos flow free and heavy.
 

Features

Some of the best Windows Mobile smartphones we’ve seen lately are the ones that add a custom GUI on top of the standard interface to make it look prettier and easier to navigate through. HTC is obviously the first company that springs to mind that does this, but Samsung and Sony Ericsson have also done a lot of custom enhancements to the front-end of their Windows Mobile devices.

Unfortunately, HP is still very much part of the old guard in this sense, and the iPAQ 912c runs the plain vanilla Windows Mobile interface. It’s the latest 6.1 version of Windows Mobile Professional, but after a steady diet of flashy interfaces from other vendors, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

There are a few non-standard applications here and there, such as Google Maps for satellite navigation, HP Enterprise Mobility Suite for fleet management within an IT department, and HP Photosmart Mobile for organising and editing photos, but nothing all that exciting. Sure, Microsoft has covered all the bases within Windows Mobile, but Internet Explorer Mobile – easily the worst smartphone browser – and Windows Media Player Mobile – also a contender for worst multimedia player in a smartphone – need to be taken out the back and put out of their misery.

That said, the third party software available for Windows Mobile is the most extensive of any smartphone platform – yes, even compared to the iPhone – and a couple of the standard apps are actually pretty good. Email within the Messaging program is excellent, with support for HTML, push email over Exchange ActiveSync, and support for opening almost all attachments. Office Mobile is also handy for viewing, editing and creating Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, including the latest Office 2007 formats.

On the wireless front, the iPAQ 912c is fully loaded with quad-band GSM, tri-band 7.2Mbit/s HSDPA, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, A-GPS and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. The latter supports A2DP for streaming audio wirelessly to a headset or speakers, but while it lets you send files to other devices over Bluetooth, for some reason you can’t receive files.

Multimedia obviously isn’t as important on a business device as it is on a consumer one, but given that most people now use the one device for work and play, we would’ve liked to see a bit more effort put into this area. The iPAQ 912c’s rear-mounted speaker is ridiculously weak, and we actually had to triple-check that we’d maxed the volume out in the settings. And it’s not like you can plug your own headphones in to hear your music or movies at a decent volume, as there’s no dedicated headphone jack on-board – just the one port for syncing, charging and connecting the supplied mini-USB headset.

If you like streaming videos from YouTube, you’re out of luck on the iPAQ 912c – there’s no streaming media client installed. The pre-installed Windows Media Player is only good for playing WMV files, so you’ll need to install a program like CorePlayer to play other formats like DivX and XviD. We loaded CorePlayer onto the iPAQ to test its video playback performance, and found it played our episode of Heroes flawlessly – as long as there weren’t any other programs running in the background.

Performance

Sitting in the engineroom is a 416MHz Marvell PXA270 processor, along with 128MB of RAM for running programs. If you’re diligent about shutting down programs after you’re done with them – not an easy thing to do given the close button only minimises applications to the background rather than close them – the iPAQ 912c runs like a dream.

The more-likely scenario is that you’ll open one program after another and end up with 10 applications running simultaneously. The processor copes well with the full load, but it does start to lag for certain tasks like web browsing and scrolling through a big database of contacts. HP would’ve done well to license HTC’s Task Manager application, which lets you view running programs from the Today screen and also change the close button’s behaviour to actually shut down programs when you tap it. As it is, you’ve got to navigate your way to the Task Manager applet in the Settings and manually close down programs one by one.

As we mentioned earlier, the iPAQ 912c’s 1,940mAh battery is enormous – easily the biggest standard battery we’ve come across on a smartphone. Talk time and standby time is rated at 7.4 hours and 250 hours respectively – in real-world testing, this translates to around four days between charges.
 

Conclusion

If you like your QWERTY keyboards and are wedded to the Windows Mobile platform, the iPAQ 912c is a decent offering with all the latest hardware features, solid build quality and excellent battery life. It’s mainly the software side where it comes up lacking, and if there’s anything that the iPhone taught us, it’s that a sexy user interface can make all the difference.

The iPAQ 912c isn’t the device we were hoping for to pull the iPAQ branding out of the doldrums, but if HP were to put more effort into enhancing and optimising the Windows Mobile experience – or maybe even ditch the platform altogether in favour of Google Android – we’d probably see the venerable iPAQ make a comeback.