At a New York City press event last week, Hewlett-Packard unveiled a series of new smartphones and traditional handsets that appear to signal a concentrated effort to resurrect the IT giant's foundering mobile device business. HP introduced two smartphones, the iPAQ 910 Business Messenger and iPAQ 610 Business Navigator. The former is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE device with support for tri-band UMTS/HSDPA 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, VoIP and assisted GPS, complete with a QWERTY thumb-keyboard and a 2.46-inch, 240 x 320 pixel resolution touch screen. The 910 also boasts 3 megapixel camera with auto focus and 4x zoom as well as a microSD slot. The iPAQ 610 is primarily differentiated from the 910 by exchanging the keyboard for a numeric keypad and expanding the display to 2.8 inches. Both smartphones operate via Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional.
The iPAQ 210 Enterprise Handheld and iPAQ 110 Classic Handheld are traditional handhelds sans phone functionality. The $450 iPAQ 210 arrives with slots for both Secure Digital and CompactFlash cards and a 4-inch, 480 x 640 pixel resolution touch screen. It supports Wi-Fi, VoIP and Bluetooth. The iPAQ 110 is a thinner, cheaper version--the Nicole Richie to the 210's Paris Hilton, if you will--but still boasts the same amount of RAM and ROM as the iPAQ 210, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Like the smartphones, both operate on Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional. All four new HP devices are scheduled to hit retail this fall.
For more on the new HP devices:
- read this release