HP iPAQ Glisten Review

Once a big time player in the PDA world, HP’s iPAQ line has deep stemming roots connected with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform. AT&T customers are now treated once again to a new smartphone from the dominant PC manufacturer in the form of the HP iPAQ Glisten. It’s been a long journey for HP, but it’s going to require some impressive features to live up to other Windows phones that are already garnering praise with good looks and functionality.

The package contains:

• HP iPAQ Glisten
• Charger
• USB Cable
• Quick Start Guide

Quickly gazing at the HP iPAQ Glisten, we were delightfully greeted to an aesthetically pleasing handset with its choice to quality materials and contrasting colors. The mostly silver and black handset does glisten with a design that’s compelling with its soft touch feeling casing and curvaceous construction.  Sure it may have an overall footprint similar to past portrait QWERTY handsets, but it’s not too overbearing or bulky (0.53” thick) – easily making it hide inconspicuously in your pocket. Although it’s somewhat heavier (4.66 oz), we feel that it’s partly welcomed thanks to a solid overall construction that makes it feel durable.

The mostly silver and black handset does glisten with a design that’scompelling with its soft touch feeling casing and curvaceousconstruction.



You can compare the HP iPAQ Glisten with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

AMOLED displays are still very rare outside of Samsung’s camp, but the HP iPAQ Glisten is fortunate to offer one that’s responsive. We’ve applauded many handsets in the past that utilized AMOLED displays, but the 2.5” QVGA display on the Glisten isn’t really as good. There’s a noticeable bluish color to the screen – it’s especially noticeable when white color is displayed.. It doesn’t seem as bright when compared to other AMOLED displays we’ve seen either. In addition, the 320 x 240 resolution with 65k colors isn’t sharp enough to prevent your eyes from squinting from garbled looking text.

The layout of the hardware buttons on the Glisten is your usual fanfare – they’re all well sized for even the largest of fingers to press. We like the fact it houses both a microUSB and 3.5mm port for the basic connectivity essentials. There’s a dedicated button on the top edge that’ll activate Wi-Fi – not sure why HP decided to go with one, but we found ourselves rarely relying on it. Finally, there’s an area on the back of the handset where the stylus rests in place.


The best feature we adored most about the Glisten is its usable and evenly sized QWERTY keyboard. It rivals some of the better ones out there like the Motorola Q9H and BlackBerry Bold 9000. There’s a solid tactile feel whenever you press down on one of the curved buttons. We would’ve liked to see a brighter backlighting, but feel it’s ample enough to make out. Speedy texters will quickly realize how well the QWERTY works for all their messaging needs – there will be no pauses or mispresses on the Glisten.

Software/Features:

Everyone is personalizing Windows Mobile in some way or another, but the bare bones interface on the Glisten is boring. What else can we say about it? You’ll be greeted to the standard Windows Mobile 6.5 interface with the same Start Menu look. The Glisten will run smoothly until you begin to overload it with multiple applications running simultaneously. Having a small screen is tough enough, but the lack of finger friendly on-screen buttons will result in having to rely on the stylus.



Thanks to its responsive QWERTY keyboard, composing a text message to someone will be accomplished with relative ease. Sure it does have a touchscreen to offer alternative options for input, but HP omitted anything new and decided to stick with the traditional ones that all Windows Mobile phones have.

Any business user will happily indulge on all the benefits the Windows Mobile platform has to offer – especially with Microsoft Exchange support. Setting up email is simple enough with the setup wizard – you’ll be asked for specific server addresses if it can’t automatically lookup the settings for your specific provider.



If instant messaging is your preference of choice when it comes to communication, you should bear in mind there’s nothing available out of the box – there isn’t even one for Windows Live Messenger. Thankfully with Windows Marketplace for Mobile, we were able to download an IM client and start chatting away with friends.

Yet another area that we found lacking was the Glisten’s third party application support. There’s very few from the get go with apps like AT&T Navigator, Mobile Banking, Facebook, Mobi4Biz, Sprite Backup, and ArcSoft Streaming Player. As for the rest, you’ll get the full arsenal of Microsoft’s Office Mobile suite to keep you hard at work when you’re away from the office.

Nothing really worth bragging about with its 3-megapixel camera, images captured looked average at best. Outdoor shots with plenty of sun produced the best images with good detail, but colors looked washed out. Indoor shots also replicated the identical dull colors with fuzzy detail. One thing that’s sure to be a hassle is the lack of a dedicated camera button on the phone – you have to go through the menus and open the camera app. Once loaded, we were impressed with the interface on the Glisten that allows even some manual settings like brightness, saturation, sharpness, and contrast to be adjusted.




Video capture on the HP iPAQ Glisten isn’t one of its highlights – it’s even more so when the maximum resolution is 320 x 240. Videos were extremely pixilated which made it difficult distinguishing any fine detail. There’s also a prominent choppy look whenever you’re recording a video and moving in between areas of “good” and “bad” lighting. Colors also had the same washed out tones that supplemented the poor video recording results we had on the Glisten. Fortunately, there was one bright spot with it – audio sounded nearly dead-on with perfect tones.

Like we said earlier, HP didn’t attempt to personalize the Windows Mobile experience – so the music player is the same old one we’ve been accustomed to seeing. The biggest thing to pain us about it is the fact that you’ll need to use the stylus to press the tiny on-screen buttons. Sound from the speakerphone did seem loud enough to hear, but lacked any bass to truly make listening to music a joyful experience. Pumping it up to the loudest volume setting, the speakerphone did not crackle at any point.


Windows Media Player was able to play two different movie trailers coded in MPEG-4 at 320 x 240 and H.264 at 320 x 136 with no problems. Videos played without any noticeable slowdown that would really diminish the overall experience. However, there’s one thing that really confused us: when we tried playing something in H.263 at 320 x 144, the playback stuttered really badly – making it skip plenty of scenes throughout the trailer. Aside from the bluish tint, the AMOLED screen does an okay job when it comes to watching videos, so we find the experience to be good enough – black levels are near perfect.


The HP iPAQ Glisten offers enough memory out of the box to install programs and save media on the handset. There’s roughly 226MB of storage memory available with 142MB reserved for applications. If you require more space, you can always supplement it with microSD cards up to 32GB in capacity. Regrettably, the inconvenient location of the slot will require you to pull the battery.

Taking the handset to other countries for voice calls won't be an issue with it's quad-band GSM capability (850/900/18000/1900 Mhz). For data use, the tri-band UMTS support (850/1900/2100 Mhz) will allow you to access 3G speeds in almost any part of the world.

Stock is the name of the game with the HP iPAQ Glisten because you’ll only have Internet Explorer to surf the web. It’s the same experience we get out of other phones using the same browser. There are plenty of other browsers out there like Opera Mobile or Skyfire that can be installed to really engage the user experience.

Performance:

Now one of the better performances we got out of the Glisten was its calling quality. The handset managed to place close to perfect phone calls with normal sounding voices on both ends. Conversations were clear with only a faint background noise on our end that didn’t sound too bothersome. Switching over to the speakerphone, we were impressed with its reproduction of sounds without any hints of crackling occurring.

Using the phone in the greater Philadelphia area, it managed to retain good connection to AT&T’s network. We found the phone displaying the same amount of bars in the same places when comparing it to other AT&T phones. During our time with it, we did not receive any dropped calls.

Battery life with the AMOLED touchscreen phone clocked in a solid full day of normal use – this included the phone actively checking email on an hourly basis and brightness set to automatic. It even survived the night and still had one bar left during the morning of the next day. HP has the phone rated for 5.8 hours of talk and 423 hours of standby.

Conclusion:

Being away from the US mobile market for some time, HP definitely has one good looking Windows Mobile smartphone that gives other similar handsets a run for their money – like the Palm Treo Pro, Samsung Intrepid and HTC Snap. Throw in features like an AMOLED touchscreen, Wi-Fi, global capabilities, and a nice portrait style QWERTY and the Glisten will surely appeal to the business user. We would’ve liked to see HP work on offering a personalized look and pales in comparison to the offerings we tend to see with other manufacturers. Nonetheless, the HP iPAQ Glisten makes for a wonderful attraction to the Windows Mobile front.

HP iPAQ Glisten Video Review: