New HP Smartphone appeared on the market roughly at the same time as BlackBerry Bold and Nokia E71 and this didn’t make its battle for the best market position any easier. Maybe it didn’t got too much spotlight because of those two competitors, but iPAQ 914c is mayor improvement compared to its predecessor iPAQ 614.

iPAQ 914c is monoblock (candy-bar) that is designed according to HP tradition. It sits conveniently in hand and it is easy to use thanks to large scroll button in upper right corner and beveled keys. Beside usual QWERTY keys HP managed to squeeze 3 additional keys: TAB, period and comma that can speed up typing significantly. In our case keyboard was not used frequently because of great touch screen. Display is actually small for today standards: 2.46inch (320x240px) and usage of stylus is obligatory. Picture quality is not great but touch sensitivity of display is one of the best we saw so far. Because of this, photographs taken with 3MPx camera (4x digital zoom and auto-focus) looked on display worst then they actually are. One of the reasons is inadequate screen brightness and ability of display to reproduce just 65.000 colors.

Beside power charger and USB cable (for synchronization and charging) in package with iPAQ 914c we got earphones of solid quality and software, but no case or carrying clip. As it is case with most iPAQ devices there are all functions for business users: Office Mobile, PDF viewer, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, GPS, planers, file and picture viewers, calendar, organizers, e-mail client and etc. There are HP applications that can be useful like Voice Reply, Voice Commander, HP Enterprise Mobility Agent etc. Built in memory capacity is not big but it can be expanded thanks to presence of microSD slot.

Since this is business device, iPAQ 914c has wide connectivity possibilities: BlueTooth, WiFi and HSDPA. WiFi is very convenient solution and functions great, it’s easy to configure but is drains battery very fast. In specification of device autonomy is declared as 4 hour of talk time and 10 days in stand-by. We got slightly different results: with usual activities battery lasted for two days despite 1940mAh capacity, and when WiFi was active we needed to charge battery every day. Connection with mobile operator (GPRS, EDGE, 3G) was as expected. If you want to make 3G video call you won’t be able, since there is no secondary camera on front side.

During our tests device worked stable with few problems here and there. Two of those problems are typical: warning about unread SMS stayed even if we have read SMS and warning about locked keyboard was on for some time even if we unlocked and used keyboard. These are software problems that can be easily corrected in next update.

Other problems are consequence of Windows Mobile 6.1 platform that is used on iPAQ 914c. All windows users are used to close applications with X in the upper right corner of application window. The same X exists in Windows Mobile environment but the result isn’t the same. On Windows Mobile this action just minimizes application. The only way to shut-down application is trough Task Manager. This is logical solution for achieving faster application launching but amount of active applications is limited. On iPAQ 914c with its 416MHz CPU and 128MB RAM you can start approximately ten applications and every application that you start after that, can slow down device noticeably. Solution is simple: visit Task Manager and close unneeded applications.