Glisten Unboxing

I have had the HP iPAQ Glisten for over a week or so now, but just getting round to the un-boxing post (sorry). I am impressed in some ways, but HP staying almost completely away from adding any custom/additional apps is a little surprising. The HTC Pure, by comparison, is much more loaded, though AT&T isn’t shy about dumping on a bunch of their apps to any phone under their network banner (apps that push up your data charges, of course). I happen to like the 6.5 WinMo interface, so it doesn’t bug me to not have extra screen widgets, but when I demoed the Glisten to my iPhone-loving son, he was not impressed (big hint there, HP). He did like the bright, clear (yet scrunched) 2.5” AMOLED screen, however. I love the slimmed down Bberry-ish looks of the Glisten. In fact, to me it’s kind of like having my Blackberry Curve with a touchscreen (and WM as the OS).

Unboxing

First, let me say that I was sent an evaluation unit, and it was possibly a pre-release version of the device, so my experience could be somewhat different than yours. I will probably do a multi-part review to cover the Glisten over the next few weeks as I use it more, but the final released version may actually function differently in some respects. It came in a plain white box without any media or accompanying manuals (and no warranty stamped on it), so I suspect this is not the exact version that will be shipped to stores. I grabbed the product specs and User manuals from the HP website here.

As you can see, there wasn’t much in the kit. The phone, a USB charging cable, a battery, and a power adapter. The first thing I did was remove the back cover and installed the battery and a microSD card for extra storage. The unit has a rubbery feel to the finish (except the side slats, buttons and screen, of course). The back cover on the Glisten is pretty easy to remove compared to other similar designs due to the grip-conducive texture. On each side of the Glisten are two attractive, metallic-finished slats. The left side slat features the volume buttons (speaker volume), and the right side a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a USB connection for charging/syncing the unit. The connection type appears to be a micro-B USB. I figured I would go ahead and fire up power (before I remembered I didn’t have my camera)!

Startup

I always like to get a few startup pix, so a reader will know what to expect when they power up a new phone. My experience with the Glisten was about the same as with the HTC Pure. A few minutes of waiting for vendor splash screens to flash by and then finally the infamous WinMo “align screen” window finally appeared, with it’s tap here, here and here routine. Since I didn’t have me camera handy the first time, I got to perform a factory restore and enjoy it all over again. The phone took an especially long time at the Windows splash--enough to make me worry (after the reset), but finally continued into a normal boot-up, and I had the pleasure of aligning again. The alignment procedure for the 16-bit 320 X 240 QVGA screen on the Glisten requires tapping at 6 separate points. The manual suggests using finger or stylus input, but I found the touch resistive screen to be more reliable when using the stylus (or possibly a fingernail).

  The HP Glisten hits the sweet-spot in terms of messaging phone hardware capabilities, wrapping 3G, WiFi, BT connectivity into an attractively shaped device with an actual thumb keyboard. RIM similarities in appearance aside, HP has been providing their own devices that include excellent hardware keyboards for many years, but I find that my Blackberry Curve keyboard is a little easier to type accurately on due to small spaces between the buttons. The HP keyboard has a nice glossy finish, but has a little less tactile feedback when pushing buttons. I like that the navigation of the Glisten display can be managed either through stylus or button and screen direct input, but Windows Phone menus are often still too cramped for using a small screen in this way. It would be cool if the round center select button also doubled as a scroll-wheel similar to the iPod players or something. It’s kind of large to do just one thing (select stuff), and the navigation ring (essentially what used to be called a d-pad) surrounding it could be a little wider for games, but I doubt that was high on the list of requirements for this particular device. The unit is styled with a feel that is more corporate, high-level executive rather than geek gamer (not that a corporate exec doesn’t enjoy the occasional frag session). I will be better able to make a recommendation on the buttons when I have installed more of my apps.

The top of the unit features power on/off/sleep button and a discrete WiFi on/off control. There are no HP add- on programs--used to appear on older devices--like iTask or the HP wireless manager (which included useful troubleshooting tools), so you will have to rely on the built-in WM apps to manage these aspects of the Glisten. I remapped the GPS hard button to launch the WinMo task manager app at least to kill programs for now. The HTC TouchFLO  interface nicely skirts this limitation with an option to kill programs when the close button is selected. I could find no such functionality on the Glisten.

Camera

HP makes some pretty fine cameras (uh, like the basic one I use for product shots) so it should be no stretch for them to put a decent camera in their phones, and the camera is really just passable in the Glisten (3.1 megapixel). HP added the camera software in this case (Photosmart), which gives you several options to upload your pix to snapfish, MMS, e-mail, and some pretty cool features like stitching together images in panorama views, but not many other image editing features. I also did not locate support for other services like facebook or other social networking sites. The camera does ok, even in relatively low light, but super clear pix were still kind of hard to capture due partly to the app refresh jerkiness. My cheapy 99 dollar digital camera (also an HP model) has a lot more shooting options, and produces much better pix than this easily. Of course, it has a much higher pixel granularity. My Curve has about the same level of camera aperture as the Glisten, and produces pretty clear images, so maybe I can tweak the settings of the camera app to improve the responsiveness.

Well, my first impressions of the phone are good, but I’m noticing a few small glitchy things that remind me of my older iPAQ handhelds. The screen is often not responsive to taps or gestures even when using the stylus. Some apps were a little sluggish starting and even after running (without any programs running in background). I will of course, work on follow-up posts of all the phone features, and it may be that I need to tweak or optimize WinMo a bit and verify this behavior with apps fully loaded, as I have often had to do with my other iPAQ devices. It could just be the eval unit I have been using as well. The phone has plenty of memory and CPU (528Mhz CPU, and 256MB/512MB SDRAM/ROM), so in the factory reset state it is in, I would imagine it would be very fast--and in most cases it is. Look for my follow-up posts focusing on phone features and apps for the HP Glisten soon. To learn more about this promising new Windows phone, the Glisten is listed and now selling at HP’s site for $379.99. I’m sure some kind of contract and rebate deals will shortly start to appear.