Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Hp laptop battery
HP has established its handheld computing name firmly in the corporate sector. It proudly holds a pivotal position here: you'll see executives toting their iPaqs on trains far more often than you'll see them with rival Pocket PCs, and only RIM's Blackberry seems to come near the iPaq for popularity. You might think HP would be happy with that niche, and concentrate on consolidating its position, but that's not the case, writes Sandra Vogel.
The company recently announced four new Pocket PCs, two of which are squarely aimed at consumers. The rx1710 with battery like Hp PF723A battery
, Hp 367759-001 battery
, Hp PM579A battery
, Hp PP2200 battery
, Hp Pavilion DV4000 battery
(Hp dv4000 battery
) , Hp Pavilion ZE2000 battery
(Hp ze2000 battery
), compaq Presario M2000 battery
(compaq m2000 battery
)is the entry-level device, but by far the more compelling of the two is the rx3715, which HP is calling its Mobile Media Companion.
In a world where Pocket PCs can be hard to differentiate (many have silver casings; Microsoft's Windows Mobile software is always there; Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are becoming ubiquitous), and differentiation is often made on the basis of things like processor speed (which can frankly be negligibly important for many home users), installed RAM (the more the better), or the size of the navigation button (a matter of personal preference), launching a device which is radically different from the rest is quite a bold move.
Differentiation is really the name of the game for HP with this Pocket PC though. The company has gone for a rather sedate slate grey casing leaving brash corporate silver behind. And Microsoft's dull old Today screen has gone, replaced by a screen that throws you straight into many of the multimedia offerings available.
One of these is a built-in Photosmart digital camera capable of shooting stills and video, the former at resolutions up to 1280 x 960 with resolutions of 160 x 120, 320 x 240, 640 x 480 also available. The latter at 160 x 120, 176 x 144 and 320 x 240. Where the still camera is concerned there are colour filters (black and white, sepia, negative, cool), white balance settings (auto, sun, tungsten, fluorescent), three data compression settings, and a self timer to play with. Image and videos are viewable on the hardware and HP replaces the Windows Mobile Pictures software with its own HP Image Zone which lets you view images, share them, print and draw on them, and works in conjunction with the supplied PC desktop version of the Image Zone software.
A Mobile Media Companion has to provide for more than just video and stills, though, and a second button on the bespoke Today screen is labelled 'mobile media'. Tapping this takes you to a new screen offering locally stored and streamed material, the latter accessed across the built in 802.11b and requiring that you install the provided Mobile Media for PC software on a Windows XP machine. If you use an older operating system, or run a Mac, you'll need to find a different streaming solution. While on the subject of wireless, you get Bluetooth functionality too, so you should be able to stay connected pretty much anywhere.
This 'media access' screen also provides a route to one of the unexpected successes of the PDA world - infrared remote control. HP has taken its media streaming software from Nevo and has also chosen to put Nevo's infrared remote control tool onto the ROM of the rx3715, thereby providing couch potatoes with control over TV, VCR, DVD player and whatever other infra red hardware they happen to have.
There are settings for a huge array of devices already built in, and the software can learn from your infrared handsets if what's provided doesn't suit. There is plenty of customisation on offer. For example, you can set up configurations for different rooms in the house and for different users and have one-tap activities - think of these as macros for the control of several infrared devices at once.
There is a copious amount of help in the printed manual covering set up and use of all this multimedia, installing and using the PC applications, streaming and downloading to the iPaq rx3715.
To round off the software range HP has included Dockware's screensaver (which presents date information over an image), the PocketTV MPEG player, and the iTask application switcher that HP uses more often than not. This now includes a button to move to landscape mode (a feature allowed by Windows Mobile for Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition but rather poorly implemented by Microsoft in that it requires you to go to the Settings area to make the change.) There is also a backup utility which, oddly, doesn't seem to want to send backup data across a wireless network to your PC.
None of the software and features on the iPaq rx3715 are impossible to configure on other Pocket PCs. But three things make this Pocket PC unique: the integration of all these elements onto ROM, the provision of copious amounts of memory in which to run locally stored media and saved images (152MB of available memory really is a vast amount for a Pocket PC), and the means to access all those multimedia odds and ends from a single non-standard main screen.