First things first: This is not a smartphone. Like the Pharos GPS 525 Pharos GPS 525, it's a PDA with preloaded GPS software, designed to help you get around and entertain yourself on the road. Though you can connect your rx5915 to the Net via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, it's most at home telling you where to go.
At 4.7 by 3 by 0.7 inches with a bright 3.5-inch, 320-by-240 touch screen, the rx5915 is just small enough for a coat pocket, but big enough to see on your dashboard. It weighs 6 ounces. The rx5915 has fewer buttons than most Pocket PCs. There's a cursor pad and buttons for OK and Menu options on the front. On the top, there's a voice-recorder button. Four side buttons launch the device's home screen, the nav application and Windows Media Player, and rotate the device's screen. The rx5915 runs in all four possible rotations, meaning it works just as well for lefties as for righties.
When you start up the rx5915, it doesn't look quite like other Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC PDAs (though the traditional interface is under there.) Instead, it starts up to a simplified home screen with a few icons, made for poking at with a finger. The most important icon, of course, activates the TomTom 6.0 navigation software, which is preloaded with 2GB of U.S. and Canadian maps in updatable Flash ROM.
The rx5915 uses the SiRFStar III GPS chipset, which acquires satellite signals quickly and accurately. The device comes with a mounting bracket that lets you pivot it on two axes. There's no visible GPS antenna, but that didn't seem to damage performance, and there's a connector for an external antenna if you want one. The iPAQ seemed significantly faster at generating long routes than TomTom software running on a Palm Treo 700p. And if you can figure out how to connect the rx5915 to the Internet via your cell phone (for more on that, see below), you can get live traffic and weather data.
Voice prompts were quite loud enough through the single speaker on the back of the device. You can also reroute the voice prompts to an A2DP compliant Bluetooth device such as stereo headphones or a car stereo system, but if you do so, the first bit of each prompt gets cut off.
Storing the TomTom application and corresponding road maps in Flash ROM leaves the rx5915's SD card slot open for fun. We had no problem multitasking MP3 playback through Windows Media Player (even using a stereo Bluetooth headset) and navigation, though sometimes the sound overlapped during voice prompts. The PDA's 400-MHz Samsung S3C 2442 processor can handle full-screen video (synced over with Windows Media Player 10), though the video does get a bit blocky. Buy a 2GB SD card, load on a few games and a cartoon or three, and you have a full-on in-car entertainment system. Our model also came with 80MB of storage memory, 54MB of program memory, and 400MB of available memory on the 2GB of GPS-related Flash memory. All together, that should be plenty for other applications. But if Internet radio's your bag, you'll be mourning the lack of an integrated cellular modem.
The rx5915 has 802.11b/g wireless. Although we connected it easily to a WEP-enabled router, there's no option for WPA. It also has fast Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, so you can hook it up to a Bluetooth-enabled phone for Internet access, but setting up that connection requires arcane, complicated settings found in no manual. We managed to link the rx5915 to a stereo Bluetooth headset and an Internet-capable phone simultaneously. It took two tries, but it worked, with only occasional skips in the music and slightly degraded audio quality.
Also a Windows Mobile Pocket PC 5.0 PDA, the rx5915 comes with all the usual software, including the WorldMate travel information application, Microsoft Office document readers and editors, and a nifty home-screen enhancement that shows wireless, memory and battery status. We were also able to run Sling Player Mobile over a Wi-Fi connection; it had a decent frame rate but ran into some video bugs with the PDA's preproduction software.
On the SPB Benchmark tests, the rx5915 performed as expected, doing better than the iPAQ rx1950 and Pharos 525 but not up to the level of a Dell Axim X51v. Battery life is decent, at five hours with maximum backlight, but that's not a huge concern, as this device will likely spend a lot of time plugged into your cigarette lighter.
Aside from the Pharos 525, the rx5915 competes with, HP's own iPAQ hw6515 which has a built-in GPS receiver, with the GPS capabilities in smartphones such as Sprint's new BlackBerry 8703e, and with PDA/Bluetooth GPS upgrade kits. In our opinion, of all the hybrid products we've seen, the rx5915 does the best job of putting GPS front and center. And as a Windows Mobile device, it has a wider variety of features than dedicated GPS units.
Of course, we stumbled upon some bugs while testing the HP iPAQ rx5915 (mostly involving software putting up with the screen rotation), but that's par for the course with an early preproduction unit. If this product is bug-free when it comes to market, it'll be the best example of a GPS PDA we've seen yet.
SPEC DATA :
- Type: Pocket PC
- Screen Size: 3.5 inches
- Operating System: Windows Mobile 5.0
- Processor Class: Samsung SC32442
- Processor Speed: 390.6 MHz
- RAM: 2 GB
- Networking Options: 802.11g
- Flash Memory Type: Secure Digital
- Bluetooth: Yes
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