HP iPAQ Glisten

HP announced the new iPAQ Glisten, a 3G world phone with an active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) screen powered by Windows Mobile 6.5.The 2.5-inch screen up top is not only a touchscreen, it's also an AMOLED display, one of the few outside of Samsung's stable, and it looks sharp. We never had trouble getting the screen to respond to our touch, as long as our aim was true and we hit the tiny buttons and menu icons Windows Mobile 6.5 presents.

The display looks nice but because the screen is so small they had to make the fonts smaller and really uncomfortable after a while to read emails and such. Icons are not sharp on this screen.The OS is snappy on this hardware and manus are fast with no lag. But it is a mismatch with the OS. They should have put WM6.5 Standard, Not PRO.

HP iPaq Glisten does a fine job with your Exchange corporate address book, and can synchronize with your Outlook contacts on your desktop as well. Other online contacts lists, like Google, Yahoo or Facebook, are left out of the loop. The contacts list may be ugly, but its highly functional. You can start typing a name from the Today screen and the phone will start searching right away. There are also plenty of fields to fill with useful information about your contacts. It's very business-like, with no fun extras like the Facebook and LinkedIn linking you'll find on phones like the BlackBerry Bold 9700 or the Palm Pre but that might be enough for some users.

The phone comes with the complete Office Mobile suite, so you can view, create and edit Word and Excel documents on the device. You can also view PowerPoint presentations to some extent. If you'll be doing a lot of typing, the iPaq Glisten has a very nice keyboard. The keys are large and well rounded.Beyond the Office Mobile suite, the iPaq Glisten also uses Microsoft's Mobile Outlook calendar and scheduling app.Though the HP iPaq Glisten uses a dazzling AMOLED display, the best looking display technology we've seen,The Web browser on the HP iPaq Glisten is the standard mobile Internet Explorer 6, and it's not a very good version of the browsing software.

he phone found our location for a first fix very quickly, and had no trouble routing us and rerouting our trip when we got lost. The interface left something to be desired, mostly the tiny zoom bar that was difficult to peck without a stylus. But otherwise the maps were clear and colorful, and the app was very useful.

The device comes preloaded with Facebook, as well as a 3.1 megapixel camera sensor and a very nice looking camera interface.In addition to the camera app, the HP iPaq Glisten also comes with HP PhotoSmart software. We expected more from the PhotoSmart kit, some editing or image enhancement tools, perhaps. But mostly PhotoSmart was good for organizing images on your storage card, printing or sending them via e-mail. There were no options built in to upload pics to your favorite social networking site or Flickr, though HP does own Snapfish, so of course there is an option to send your photos to that image sharing site.