Windows Phone Thoughts: The New iPAQ Mobile Messenger: hw6915 - A Tough Package To Beat

Performance
Pocket PC Phone editions have a rather anemic persona that they must overcome in the community. Two years ago, when HP initially introduced the TI OMAP processor in the h6315, the community became fairly disenchanted with it rather quickly. While the battery life was outstanding (up to 7 hours of use on one charge), the slow speed made those 7 hours pure agony at times. Two years later and it seems that the OMAP is on its way out, with successor devices to OMAP Originals (h6315, HTC Wizard) receiving beefier chips. In the hw6900 series, HP chose to go with an Intel PXA270 chip running at 416 MHz, which is a great improvement over the h6315's OMAP 151 at 200 MHz and the hw6500 series' PXA270 running at 312 MHz. More processing power in general plus a few other surprises are revealed by the benchmarks. Let's take a look.


Figure 13: Spb CPU Index.

CPU speed-wise, there really are no surprises. The hw6915 falls right about where it should based on its processor speed. HP's challenge, no doubt, was to take a device with a mid-speed processor and improve other areas enough to give the impression of a faster device. What is the most visible feature that users notice in a device? How fast it "feels". Note that the "feels" part is a perception that isn't necessarily tied to speed of the chip. The fastest chip bogged down by another component will feel slower than it really is. One of the key components of our perception of speed is graphics. Let's take a look at how the iPAQ stacks up there.


Figure 14: Spb Graphics Index.

WOW! The iPAQ blows away the rest of the units when it comes to the graphics index. In using the device, one of the first things I noticed was how fast it seemed when re-drawing the screen (i.e. switching tabs, etc.). I often get the feeling that I move quicker than the computers around me (this is pointed out to me when others watch me move my mouse or hover my stylus over an area of the screen yet to contain a button), and I can honestly say that the amount of times I found myself doing that with the hw6915 was substantially less than any other Pocket PC I've used.


Figure 15: Overall Spb Benchmark Index.

Overall the iPAQ hw6915 scores about middle of the road compared to other recent Pocket PC Phone releases. While it isn't the fastest kid on the block, it certainly doesn't suffer the same chronic slow syndrome as previous Pocket PC Phones. For a daily driver that takes its fair share of use and abuse in a day, it's the right mix of speed and power usage for the majority of users.