REVIEW : HP IPAQ 5550

Rating: (7 out of 10)

Note : This review can also be applied to the iPaq 5150. The machines are almost identical. The 5150 does not have WiFi, biometric fingerprint scanner, and has only 64mb RAM and 32mb ROM.

Introduction
"Why is this site reviewing a 5 month old PDA? That is old news!" - Admit it, that’s what you are thinking. Right? Well, I’ll answer anyway. In case you are unaware, iPaqHQ.com is a new site, it was created a few months after the h5550 came out. Now we have to go back and catch up so we can provide the most info for our community as we can. In fact the pending arrival of this Pocket PC is why I finally decided to create the site.

I received this unit a week ago and it has only been outside of arms reach a few hours. Yes, I even slept with it under my pillow to see if the alarm works. I obviously have not run into the dead alarm trouble that many have complained about. It works just fine for me. Of course, I silenced it and fell back asleep anyhow. 3-4 hours of sleep a night is rough I tell you.

What is in the Box?
This is the 1st thing most want to know. What does all this cash get me.

The not so fancy box contained the following:

• HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5550
• Lithium ion polymer removable/rechargeable battery
• Leather holster with clip
• USB Desktop cradle/charger (USB and Serial)
• AC Adapter
• Charger adapter
• Getting-started guide
• HP iPAQ Pocket PC Companion CD

There are many programs and links on the companion CD, I listed the key programs below:

• Outlook 2002
• Active Sync 3.7
• RealOne player
• MARGI Systems Inc.’s Presenter-to-Go
• iPresentation Mobile Converter LE
• MobiMate’s WorldMate
• ClearVue Office Suite™ Complete Office file viewing solution
• Adobe® Acrobat® Reader® for Pocket PC
• JeodeRuntime
• Colligo Personal Edition for Pocket PC

Specifications

Design
This is one of the areas that make up a great deal of points with me. Does it look cool, oh heck yeah. This is one of the best looking PDAs I have ever seen. It just looks tough. As you can tell from the photo below, the screen seems to be off-centered a little to the left. This seems to be to provide room for the stylus.

Size Comparison

h2215 on top of h5550

The plastic case has a classic metal look to it and the black plastic trim and the shiny chrome buttons add to its nice looks. The size is somewhat of a concern to some. The unit weighs 7.3 ounces and measures 5.4 by 3.3 by 0.6 inches. After carrying a Dell Axim x5 around it is not too much difference. The it is just a tad heavier than the 6.9 ounce X5 and not too much bigger. Despite being plastic, the casing feels really solid.

All the buttons and controls are located just right for my large hands. There are only a couple problems I see here. Well one is not really a design problem, rather a performance problem. The lack/Removal of a high powered IR. I would like to control my entertainment system from the h5550 while I am surfing sites. Oh well. I will have to use my X3 in the Den. The other problem is one I can not figure out. Why on earth did they put the headphone jack at the bottom? Why?

As you can see in the above left picture, the buttons are very similar to all Pocket PCs. The D Pad button is very small, but quite impressive considering. The main differences in this model are the biometric fingerprint scanner and the "iTask" button. ( will go over iTask a little in the next section) I will say that I absolutely love the volume control. It is a great location for changing constantly. When I am playing games on my overpriced Gameboy, I like to hear the sounds. When the boss comes around the corner, I can turn it down quickly. Missing from this machine is a jog dial…. How can you read ebooks without a jog dial. Oh my !

Battery & Battery Compartment

Here is something I do not like much, the battery. No, it is a great 1250mah battery and it is removable and all, but its color is noticeably different from the casing. Under the battery cover, as pointed out by Cnet, there appears to be a Sim card slot. Hmmm…. I guess this casing design will be used at least once more in the future?

The Case! Unlike the Dell Axims I have, the case that comes with this one is actually worthy of using. This case lets the h5550 lay down on its side in the case. It has a sturdy metal clip and SD cards slots built in. The flap connects with a strong magnet closure.

Oh, Did I mention the screen? The screen is 3.8" as opposed to most PocketPC’s 3.5" screen. The difference is noticeable, but there is not a huge difference. The only drawback I can see of having this larger screen is the power consumption will be a tad bit more.

For those that love the classic look and the ability to use the expansion sleeves, good news, you still can. You can use several of the sleeves that were designed for earlier models. I am using the CF sleeve. It gives the unit much more bulk, but you can also gain power and greatly expandability.

CF Expansion Sleeve

The cradle is a well balanced but fragile feeling plastic. It only has one slot to slide your h5550 in and does not include any added charging ability for an external battery. The cradle feels cheap and I was honestly worried about it tipping over when I placed this nice sized unit into it. On a good note, the cradle has both serial and USB connections. This is a good point for those that run NT and older Operating systems that do not support USB. Another issue I have with the cradle is the biometric fingerprint scanner is hard to operate in the cradle. Not real important, but a pain when I need to use it on the cradle.

The Cradle

Features
The best features of the iPaq H5550 are the built in WiFi and Bluetooth. They left out a consumer grade IR, but they bumped the RAM up to 128mb. The 400MHz PXA255 XScale processor has been surpassed by the PXA263 found in the Dell Axim X3. The headphone jack has a microphone lead for using a headset. This would be a great feature if it was a PPC Phone, but I can not image why I’d use this feature. The removable battery allows you to swap batteries when needed. The SD slot is SDIO compliant, so you can buy that barcode reader you have dreamed about.

HP does include a number of custom iPaq applications, including Fingerprint Reader and the iTask Manager. There is also a handy Image Viewer Application. There is a feature that is included on my previous PPC( Dell Axim x3i), that I would love to see on future h5550’s or its replacement, a better Wifi sniffer. Even with Windows Mobile 2003’s better Wifi Support, it is a pain to switch from one network to another. If you are using your h5550 in your own home or office only, it works super in minutes. When I leave my home and get ready to access another WAP, I had to manually disconnect from my network and manually connect to the new network. The x3i’s sniffer displays all networks and their status and you can easily switch between them. I downloaded a nice program that does allow the same network detection as the x3i’s utility. It is called Winc. It automatically detects all available WiFi network details including SSID, channel, signal strength and WEP details.

The Bluetooth works fine and I have had no troubles setting up. I will reviewing a Bluetooth Presenter soon. It works great with this upcoming product review.

There have been numerous complaints about the biometric fingerprint scanner stating that it is buggy. Once again, I have not witnessed this. After a grueling 10 minute training on how to scan my print, it normally only takes 1 try to get in. This is a truly amazing feature. I will admit that after a few days it becomes trivial, but if you do have sensitive material on your unit, this could become invaluable.

The infrared port no longer supports the Consumer IR signals that allows it to act as a remote. This was a good feature of the 5450. This does not mean that you can not use the IR, it just means that you will have a great deal less range.

A great feature that lured me in, was the memory. Most Pocket PCs today have 64mb RAM and 32/48mb ROM. The iPaq 5550 has 128mb RAM and 48 Rom. What is really nice is that the unit allows 17mb of the ROM to be used for file storage. This area of storage is unaffected by hard resets, making it a great place to store system backups.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 2003. WM2003 packs an improved version of the PIE and improved Wifi configuration. Other than than the new Windows Media player and the Jawbreaker, there is very little vi sable change between Pocket PC 2002 and Window Mobile 2003. I chose not to do a mini-review of the Windows Mobile 2003 OS in this review since it has been done several times now. If you want to read more about the differences between WM 2003 and PPC 2002, you can check out this review of Windows Mobile 2003 on the Dell Axim x5.

The audio of the h5550 is pretty nice. The internal speaker has a lot to be desired, but the audio from the stereo headphone jack is superb. HP has included an iPaq Audio Control application that offers a bass boost with a power saving feature, and an automatic microphone gain.

For those with a great deal of meetings, there is also a vibrating alert. This can be very handy for those sitting in a meeting with one client and needs to be warned that they are close to their next meeting with another client. You can set the vibration to happen when you get an email and many other events normally indicated by a beep or other sound.

Performance
The h5550 sports a 400mhz Intel PXA 255 xscale processor. It has a faster bus speed than the 5450 with the PXA 250 processor, but seems sluggish compared to the 2215 and the Dell Axim x3. While it did run anything I have thrown at it well, the start menu hesitated and other small tasks were not as peppy as I expected.

As you can see, the X3i outperforms these units in the Benchmark Index mainly because of its obscene graphics numbers. The 5550 shows pretty well against the peppier 2215 and performs far better than its predecessor, the 5450.

I am impressed with these numbers, I honestly thought the new internal design of the 2215 and the x3i would surpass the 5550, but it appears I was wrong. Once again the results killed the 5450.

I dunno what to say here as I shrug my shoulders and move on.

Battery Life
The 5555 comes with a user replaceable 1250 MAh Lithium Ion battery. Battery life depends on your wireless usage. The life span of a charge without using Bluetooth or Wifi is about 4-5 hours. That is a descent time, but when you are using Wifi it drains much faster. I was able to surf the web for 2 hours before a fresh charge put me down below 50% though. Of course your actual life will vary depending on how CPU intensive the applications are and how you have your backlight configured. I get much less life out of my machines because I love full brightness. The battery control program allows you to set up some power saving and warning levels to help manage the life dependant on how you intend to charge.

Battery Test #1 - The h5550 was soft reset, one mp3 on the SD card, half volume, full brightness (with no dimming after x minutes). My h5550 played for 4 hours and 7 minutes.
Battery Test #2 - The h5550 was soft reset, one mp3 on the SD card, half volume, full brightness (backlight to dim after 5 minutes). My h5550 played for 5 hours and 32 minutes.

For me the battery is rarely an issue on any Pocket PC. I use my machine 4-5 hours on and off throughout a work day and it gets juice from the time I get home to the time I leave from work the next day. I do alot of my reviews and testing of applications at home with the power connected.

Wireless Performance
Bluetooth - I am very impressed with the range of the Bluetooth. I stood outside of the Circuit City in my town and enabled bluetooth. I went to manually connect and browse to other devices. I was planning on setting this up outside so I would not bring attention to myself in the store. The PDA display is 30-40 feet inside the door in this location. As I got ready outside to make my playing inside a bit faster, a list of devices started popping up. 4 Palm Devices and 3 Pocket PC devices showed up on my list. I tried to connect to one of the Pocket PC devices and I could not connect to browse a system. When I walked in the store, I was surprised to see an iPaq 2215 sitting on the Bluetooth Authorization screen asking if I wanted to allow my 5550 access. Very Nice. I transferred a couple files as souvenirs and moved on to buy what I went for. (DVD-R Blanks)

WiFi - There is nothing really to report here. The range is average. I was able to connect to any un secured network I encountered and got average range. I believe the range on the x3i is greater. For my own personal use, I can access anything I want from anywhere I would ever want to access it from. The speed of my connections was very nice too. I connect at home to an 802.11g WAP and I can bring up pages on my shared cable connection as almost as fast as my desktops. No complaints here about performance. Utilization on the other hand is not great. As I mentioned earlier, you really need to buy an external sniffer to take advantage of multiple networks.

Value
Value is a word that is not synonymous with this machine. There are a lot of features packed into this monster, but I can not see the $649 USD price tag as a "value". If you throw out the vibrating alarm, the biometric fingerprint reader, the extra 64mb RAM, and the slightly larger display, you can buy an h4155 for $200 less. In addition, you can also lose some size and weight. If you do not need Bluetooth, you can drop another $75 and get an very well equipped Dell Axim x3i.

Bottom line…. Vibrating alarm, the biometric fingerprint reader, the extra 64mb RAM, and the slightly larger display = $200. Are these items worth $200 to you?

Conclusion
This machine is not needed by the average human, desired maybe, but by far not needed. There are many devices out today that will do most of the same functions for far less money. I will be honest, I am far from impressed. I expected this thing to do it all and do it all faster. The finger print scanner is trivial for an average user and the size of the display is not that much greater. The extra 64mb RAM is great, but that’s about the only true advantage I see that the h5550 has over any other Pocket PC. If you want status, large size, and some nice extras that are not really needed, get one of these. If not, I recommend the iPaq h4150 or the Dell Axim x3i.

Pros

• 128 MB memory
• Built in Bluetooth
• Built in Wifi
• Fingerprint scanner
• Good bundled software
• Great headphone sound
  

Cons

• Price
• Size
• No CF Slot
• No jog dial
• Lack of customer IR
• Poor Speaker

Written by Chris Leckness · Filed Under Mobilitysite Reviews, PocketPC 
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