HP Glisten Wrap-Up

 I have really enjoyed using the Glisten the past month as a carry-along phone. Actually it’s been a little longer, since I had to wait until after CES wrapped up to post this. I couldn’t stop comparing it to my Blackberry Curve (they look very similar), but with many superb features that my Blackberry does not sport—such as WiFi, and the AMOLED screen. The Curve gets points for it’s handy trackball, which the iPAQ lacks. See my previous posts here and here for basic phone features, and apps. Both units work well enough in a cursory side-by-side comparison to recommend either. However, the Glisten still acts up in iPAQ fashion now and again (or maybe I should say WinMo fashion). This is the most stable and responsive iPAQ unit I have thus far tested, but to smash the Curve, it has a ways to go yet.

In previous posts, I focused on the hardware and basic functionality of the phone. I was mildly impressed with the speed and somewhat improved screens in the updated Windows Phone OS. HP does not go out of the way to add a bunch of frilly add-on software as in the latest HTC lineup of handsets (see my review of the Pure here). In some ways, this is good, because one gets to experience Windows Mobile sans excessive eye-candy. But, many warts are still there: like un-simple memory management, buried features/options and some stylus-required user input. Many improvements are evident as well: a somewhat better home screen, touch-friendlier navigation, and simpler setup options. The incremental update to 6.5 shows that MS is heading in the right direction, albeit in their own good time. 

Texting and Phone Functions

I covered e-mail configuration/use somewhat in my last post, but phone and texting rightly deserves it’s own section. The Glisten has a big advantage here (IMO) for users who must rely heavily on their phones for messaging. I think it is a discerning factor for considering this phone. For one, you don’t have to slide out anything to get to the keyboard. The touch screen also provides quick scrollable access to threaded messages (as much as one can call WinMo messaging truly “threaded”). There is a minus regarding the font size. Expanding fonts in WinMo to their largest size is only partly effective. I also don’t like the fact that I have to constantly hit the send softkey to initiate responses (the return key should do this, no?), and threads do not update dynamically. The Glisten scores well in speed of text entry due to the keyboard alone, but the WinPho OS loses points for the tiny font sizes (in alerts and along the top taskbar), and not making texting more intuitive.

The phone features are pretty blase (vanilla-flavored WinMo). Dialing on the Glisten (as well as my Curve), is pretty hard to do with the keyboard, but again the Glisten pulls a bit ahead in this area as it also has the touchscreen. You can choose to enable the soft num-pad input instead, and tap in numbers through the screen. There is an easy to use voice command application on the Glisten that was quite effective at recognizing my commands. I would probably advise a potential Glisten buyer to find or purchase a 3rd-party app to manage dialing, contact and texting functions (one with more intuitive and enhanced features). Plenty excellent free and not-free examples are available, but you can see my review of a few here, and here to get an idea.

Web Browsing and Streaming Video

I like the new IE Mobile web browser. Much improved it is over previous versions, and it performed pretty well on the Glisten. The browser is catching up to the iPhone and iPod touch, and no doubt beats the latest RIM browsers I have used. It works a bit better, I would have to say, in the Mobile vs. Desktop browse mode. The desktop mode would not always play videos without producing an error, and seemed to crash the unit at least once, causing me to have to soft-reset the Glisten. It is also obviously a bit slower as it tries to render all page elements as you would see them on a normal desktop browser. Using the Mobile browse mode, I was able to instead select a link, which then opened the video in question in the built-in streaming video player (provided in the additional “Apps” section).

However, when I played embedded video from my own personal blog here, it played fine in Mobile IE (in Desktop mode). My iPod touch loaded the pages faster, but could not display my javascript chat widget. IE Mobile displays the widget, and I was even able to send a message (to myself logged into chat from my iPod). That’s pretty impressive actually, and shows that MS is finally getting serious about enabling better mobile access to rich content. In many respects, I consider the iPhone Safari browser to be one of the top mobile browsing experiences, and other than the clunky back-n-forth display of the address field (which fairly drove me crazy), I would say mobile IE faired well in comparison. Not that I don’t have a long list of complaints still… see the summary section for more of those. IE Mobile is getting better, but Opera Mobile is still probably my choice for WinMo web-browsing.

In the last post I covered the process of using Windows Media Player to sync up tunes, pictures, and video content from my PC to the Glisten, and there were some issues, but I would give the Glisten a decent score for music playback. The new home screen has a nifty built-in music playback selection (basically a toggle on/off and slide gesture to move between songs). The small speaker built into the unit produced good sound quality during both music and video playback. In fact, it produced a higher output than my touch. It’s still a pain however to adjust sound levels in WinMo or to add music on the device, because of the hobbled mobile version of the Windows Mobile Media Player. Again, in general, the hardware performed well, but the software could use some improvements.

Sprite Software is another application that deserves a nod of appreciation. It is valuable to have a good backup of your data somewhere handy, preferably somewhere safe. Active Sync has always done a good job of doing this if you regularly sync your device, but what if you don’t use Active Sync? Sprite is one of the leading software vendors in Windows Mobile system backup on the market today, and in fact was included on older iPAQs as well. It is a good product, and I have tested it extensively in the course of evaluating software for our annual awards. I was surprised when it failed the first time I tried backing up the full filesystem. On the second go, I made sure to kill all extra running applications, and it worked fine without error.

…The quality of games has gotten markedly better since the old iPAQ days. I played a few demo rounds of Star Wars (the Force Unleashed) on the Glisten. The game performed admirably…

The Glisten comes with AT&T nav software installed, but unlike the Pure that had a 30-day trial, you get a working but less feature-filled AT&T maps app instead on the Glisten. This is great for trip planning (or stopping to check your route), but not for much more. The screen is a little small for navigation anyway (which is a problem I have with my Curve as well), but being able to drag the screen around is a big plus. You can upgrade to the full Navigator service, of course.