At 6.6 ounces and clad in a gray magnesium chassis, the 4700 feels solid and professional in your hand. The 4700's star feature is the screen. The 4-inch VGA LCD looks positively huge, with rich, deep colors. But you'll pay a penalty in brightness for this wealth; although the display is deep and subtle, we found it a bit dim under direct light. A sturdy plastic cover protects the screen, but we found it annoying because it kept threatening to flip back into place while we were working.
A tiny touchpad replaces the usual four-way navigation button. It works well for navigation, either as a traditional touchpad or as a virtual four-way navigator. But we had trouble double-tapping with our finger to select things, and often had to pull out our stylus.
The 4700's 624-MHz Intel processor simply blows away previous-generation iPaqs, and helped the unit perform about on a par with the Dell Axim X30 (built on the same CPU) in everything but our PDA graphics tests. (The X30 has a QVGA screen, so it only has to process ¼ of the graphics data the 4700 does.) The HP model is far faster than the only other VGA PocketPC on the US market, the Toshiba e805.
That said, both we and HP strained to find any applications that take full advantage of the processor and VGA screen. We settled on two, PDF viewing and remote access to our desktop PC (through GoToMyPC, as Microsoft's built-in Terminal Services Client wastes screen real estate with a huge menu bar). Over a Wi-Fi connection, we saw and manipulated our desktop screen with minimal scrolling; the processor ensured that the system felt responsive. PDF viewing is similarly exciting; in landscape mode it's easy to view the full width of an 8 ½-by-11 page. But we were stymied by the buggy ClearView PDF browser we used, which crashed on or refused to open several PDFs. In our testing, we also managed to crash Pocket Word, Mapopolis, and the Pocket PC version of Skype—though not the Pocket PC OS itself. Mapopolis in particular seemed deeply confused by the VGA screen in landscape mode.
Basic Web browsing also looks great, though we wanted more. Pocket Internet Explorer uses too much screen real estate for menu bars, and it mangles sites like Travelocity, MTV.com, and the New York City subway/bus map and schedule site. Microsoft says they're working to improve Pocket IE, and that they've recently added JavaScript and CSS support, but there's still no desk-top-quality browser for this desktop-quality hardware.
HP did throw in some other useful utilities. A new Today screen shows battery life, free memory, and brightness. Also included are the award-winning Pocket Informant PIM application and an easy-to-use wireless application that makes hooking up to Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices a breeze.
The hx4700 is an investment in the future. HP has supplied the hardware for the next-generation Pocket PC experience. Now it's time for application vendors to come out with software that's worthy of this machine (and that will run properly on it).
Benchmark Data:
SPB Benchmark: 1,635
CPU index: 2,460
File-system index: 1,462
Graphics index: 877
Platform index: 1,333
Battery life: 5 hours 45 minutes (typical-use test)
SPEC DATA :
- Screen Size: 4 inches
- Operating System: Windows Mobile 2003
- Flash Memory Type: CompactFlash, Secure Digital
- Bluetooth: Yes
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