Windows Phone Thoughts: HP iPAQ 2215 - The New Shining Star in the Pocket PC Galaxy?

A Lot to Love for Audiophiles
Because it’s been a while since I’ve used an iPAQ full-time, this is the first time I really sat down to test out the bass/treble boost functionality located in the control panel. Colour me impressed! After plugging in my Sony MDR-EX70LP headphones, I listened to a bass-friendly favourite of mine (Extreme’s “Tragic Comic”) that begins with a delicious riff from an acoustic bass, complete with the sound of the pick hitting the strings. Did the iPAQ 2215 pull it off? You bet! Even without the bass/treble adjustments, it sounded quite good (lacking slightly in bottom-end tones however). A few tweaks on the bass/treble sliders later and it sounded almost perfect.


Figure 15: Bass and treble adjustments.

At first I thought the amp didn’t go very loud, but just like your desktop version of Windows, there are two volume sliders you need to adjust to get maximum volume – the Windows Media player audio level and the system audio level. Once I cranked up both, it was quite loud. I wouldn’t recommend cranking up the system audio level all the way – I noticed a hint of distortion. A safe maximum would be the system volume on one below the top and the WMP volume level up all the way.

There aren’t any headphones in the box, which is a great thing. Why? Because the 50 cent headphones all the OEMs include can’t do justice to any type of music (ok, perhaps country music, but I digress…). The user will experience much more satisfaction with the 2215 as a music player if they drop $20 on some intro-level headphones.

Perhaps the most impressive thing was what I didn’t hear: no hiss. With most other Pocket PCs, when the amp is idling (not playing sound) but not yet in sleep mode, there’s a slight hiss. This hiss pervades every bit of audio that it plays, including music. Most of the time when you’re listening to music you wouldn’t hear the hiss. Still, knowing it was there always bothered me. Switching from song to song results in a very quiet pop, but even at maximum volume it’s almost inaudible. The dreaded “iPAQ audio pop” is finally gone for good!

Video Playback – Better, But Not Quite Perfect
Once of the things I’ve been told for months about the new Windows Media Player 9 Series client for the Pocket PC is how much they’ve improved the performance traits. I’ve seen some demos and was duly impressed, but I wanted to give it a try for myself.

I took a 2 hour, 34 minute 502 MB MPEG1 rip of my Aliens 2 DVD at 192 x 320 resolution (455 Kbps) and, using the Windows 9 Series Encoder, I converted it to a 277 MB (263 Kbps) Windows Media Video file. The default Pocket PC profile for full-screen video is 320 x 240, but since the original source file was cropped to letterbox format, I adjusted the encoding profile to trim away the excess screen space which saved even more space than the already impressive WMV compression. The resulting video was easily played back in full screen mode by WMP9 and the audio and video were perfectly in sync. The quality was a little lacking on scenes with high motion and dark backgrounds – MPEG1 compression is known for its blockiness - so transcoding from that format into WMV is far from ideal. I haven’t had time to rip a new DVD, but considering that WMP seems to handle this bit rate without problems, I predict a raw rip to WMV would have great quality.

All was not perfect however – I took a 362 Kbps WMV file and transcoded it to a 266 Kbps WMV file using the 9 Series encoder and the audio and video were slightly out of sync (about 5 ms). If you weren’t paying close attention, you might not notice it, but neither the original or the transcoded WMV file exhibited similar behaviour on my desktop PC, so I have to wonder what’s going on. I’ll investigate further, but so far everything I’ve thrown at the new Media Player has played, including video clips pulled directly off the Net (320 x 240, 368 Kbps). Reaching the point where you don’t necessarily need to transcode the video clip is a big step – it means less hassle and more natural use of your digital media.