HP iPaq Glisten – A Basic Smart Phone
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
3.1 mega pixel camera, good QWERTY keyboard.
Thumbs Down:
Small screen, using touch screen on such a tiny display is miserable, a bit sluggish
Inside the Trunk:
Technology: GSM / 3G
Band: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (Quadband) / 3G 850/1900/2100 (Tri-band)
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: EDGE, GPRS, QWERTY keyboard, music player, etc.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
AMOLED QVGA 2.5 inch display, resolution is 240X320. The phone has a full sized QWERTY keyboard.
The phone is powered by 528MHz Qualcomm 7200A. 1590mAh lithium ion battery of the phone gives a rated talk time for 5 hours and 15 days of standby time.
The music player can play AAC, MP3, AAC+, MIDI and WMA formats and the video formats supported are H.263, WMV, H.264, MPEG4. The internal memory of the phone is 256MB SDRAM/512MB flash and you can expand it up to 32 GB through microSD cards.
The phone has 3.1 mega pixel camera on the back and there is software of PhotoSmart Mobile for editing photos.
Razzle Dazzle:
HP iPaq Glisten has a Motorola Blackberry looks with the full size keyboard which takes up most of the phone’s real estate and the screen looks a bit smaller. The exteriors have corporate looks with the dark black casing on. The phone is 2.48 inch wide, 0.52 inch thick and 4.45 inch big. It looks a bit too wide and it didn’t fit properly in our hands, in fact we had to stretch our fingers out a little. The wideness will also be an obstacle when you put in your pocket as it will occupy a lot of space.
Inside Dope:
Computer and printer giant HP hasn’t made new phones for us since a long time. However they are here now with a touch screen smart phone for business users. HP iPaq Glisten is a typical smart phone and does deliver on the most used applications which a phone of this type should have but we were not much impressed with the overall features of the handset. HP has used AMOLED screen for the display which is now preferred by manufacturers owing to its low power consumption, better viewing angles and better picture quality. But we thought that with this tiny display the AMOLED screen is wasted. You will pay more for AMOLED screen mobile phones but you won’t get worth for your money since it is too tiny for watching videos. We feel AMOLED screen is for phones like Samsung Omnia HD which has a huge screen.
Glisten display is just 2.5 inch and doesn’t do too much to exploit the capabilities of the AMOLED screen because the resolution of 240X320 is too low. But the screen is vibrant and you can read text clearly, it is just that expectations soar high when you see an AMOLED screen phone.
A small screen and resolution also means that you will have to scroll more in the menu. The menu houses about six icons at a time which we think is a bit low considering that this is a smart phone. You will need to use the stylus often on the display because it is all so tiny in there that you might mis hit icons. Below the display there are a few buttons like call and end keys, OK button, start menu button and the direction keypad.
The QWERTY keyboard beneath the screen is good, it looks a lot like Blackberry keyboards. The keys are elevated from the surface, they are domed and there is plenty of backlighting. We were comfortable using this keyboard while typing but we wished this keyboard was sacrificed for a bigger screen. A virtual keyboard would have done the job just well.
On the top of the handset there is a button to switch off the phone and a key which lets you turn Wi-Fi on or off. On the sides there is a volume rocker, microUSB port and 3.5 mm head phone jack. If you want to put in expansion microSD cards you will have to dig in behind the battery cover because that is where the slot is located
Accessories with the Glisten include a power adapter, software disc, USB cord and reference manual.
The Glisten is running on latest Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Edition and it gives you an improved Windows Marketplace for Mobile and Microsoft’s My Phone backup service. The lamentable Internet Explorer Mobile is revamped but is still miles behind Safari.
For messaging, the e-mail features is same as Windows Mobile 6.1 which gives you real-time synchronization for Outlook e-mail, tasks, calendar and contacts through Exchange Server. Windows Mobile 6.5 promises support for unified messaging, busy/free calendar lookup, conversation view for e-mails, etc. once Exchange 2010 comes out. Other than this the handset supports IMAP and POP3 connectivity apart from the standard text and multimedia messaging.
Other applications on the Glisten include Sprite Backup, MSN Money, Adobe Reader LE, Microsoft Office Mobile Suite, AT&T Navigator, MSN Weather, AT&T Video, Yellow Pages Mobile and AT&T Music
There is no limit when it comes to storing contacts in your phone book. A single entry can take multiple e-mail addresses, phone numbers, company information, etc. There is support for photo caller ID, group ID and you can also give unique ring tone to individuals.
Other features on the Glisten include Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi, GPS and Glisten also supports AT&T’s 3G network.
The music player on the Glisten can read AAC, MP3, AAC+, MIDI and WMA formats. The video player can play H.263, WMV, H.264, MPEG4 formats. The phone has 512 MB of flash internal memory but you can microSD slot can take up to 32 GB cards. Music quality was decent but video quality was passable even with the AMOLED screen because the display was too tiny. For listening to music there is a 3.5 mm phone jack so you can plug in your favorite brand of headphones.
We were glad to find a 3.1 mega pixel camera in the back of the Glisten. Some smart phone still give a mediocre 2 MP camera (and they call the phones ‘smart’) which is quite disappointing. We all know that HP makes excellent photo printers and it has shipped in PhotoSmart Mobile application which let you edit photos on the phone itself. Quality of the photos was good but there was a bit of shutter lag.
We didn’t have much to complain when we tested the smart phone for call quality. There was plenty of volume (some phones are not loud enough even at highest level) and voice was clear.
Our friends too reported similar results but said the quality could have been better. The quality dips in speaker phone, the voice sounded garbled and tinny and it we couldn’t make out what our friends were saying.
Volume could have been a bit more for speaker phone because it is difficult to hear in noisy backgrounds. Bluetooth pairing of head sets was fast and there weren’t much problems in call quality this time but again it depends on the head set you are using.
Nitty Gritty:
HP iPaq Glisten is a basic smartphone, we were really disappointed with the video quality considering this is a AMOLED display. We didn’t find anything out of the box in the phone that will make us recommend it.
