If form factor is tops in your priority, it speaks your language

Author's Rating:

Pros: Stylish, functional, affordable

Cons: slower processor for a $300 offering, need more bundled wares.

The Bottom Line: 
It builds on the success of the original H1910. If lack of Wifi was the only deciding factor from before, you now have no more excuses.

Author's Review
The IPAQ 1940 is HP’s replacement for the popular H1910. The H1910 model was successful for two main reasons. One, its small form factor is by far the sleekest one for the whole Pocket PC concept and two, it does most of the things you come to expect from Pocket PC’s. Hence, the 1910 replacement, also known as 1940 and 1945 (HP’s internet designations) does not stray from those two key points.

IPAQ 1940 made slight improvements on its color screen from before. Since the original 1910’s trans-reflective screen was already one of the finest in the industry, the improvement will not be noticed all that much. It still remains one of the best if not the best screen out there comparing to all PDA’s. Yes, its better than its big cousin HP 5000 series.

New to IPAQ line is the standard bluetooth short range radio. If you haven’t heard about the bluetooth yet there’s a good reason for that, its not very popular. The concept of bluetooth is to reduce and/or eliminate wire cluttering on the desktop. Still in its infancy but one day, all of your accessories on your desktop will be connected via bluetooth so you no longer would have parallel cables, serial cables, keyboard/mouse cables, etc. Just because it hasn’t caught on yet, doesn’t mean it’s destined to go away. Bluetooth is most likely here to stay. So if your desktop PC is equiped, you can actually sync wirelessly. But for now, what is most intriguing about it is probably its potential for you to surf the Internet ANYWHERE. Anywhere that you have a cell phone signal that is. With 3G networks being rolled out by wireless phone companies, and with your bluetooth equipped cell phone (see Sony-Ericsson) and armed with your brand spanking new IPAQ, your wireless phone acts as a router to the Internet for your IPAQ. Sounds great but its not quite that simply YET. Without going into great details, you’ll first need a carrier with data capabilities, and then a wireless phone that’s bluetooth capable and a wireless plan with data that fits your appetite. Good luck finding that combination.

Another new addition to the 1900 series is the SDIO slot. Previously it was only a SD slot. The main difference is the capability for wider array of accessories. The biggest accessory that may interest you is probably WiFi. Before, due to voltage and other limitations, one cannot get a WiFi SD card. That sent a lot of tech geeks feverishly waiting for the dream of free Internet on the go through the roof. Well, now you can get a WiFi SDIO card so you too can go to Starbucks and surf wirelessly. This has been made a lot easier thanks to the Pocket PC 2003 or Windows Mobile 2003. Now its just as easy to find hotspots as it was with your Windows XP. If you’re not familiar with how easy it is with XP, trust me, its easy.

As with the case of all 1900 series, it does not have a Compact Flash slot. This was omitted for the simple reason of saving space. If CF slot as well as form factor is important to you, you may wish to consider the HP 2210 model. That’s the smallest PPC PDA with both CF and SDIO slot. The other HP offerings as well as Dell Axim (great price though) are just too darn big.

The new operating system is dubbed Windows Mobile 2003. It was previously known as Pocket PC 2003 as will probably always be referred to as such. You’ll notice very few cosmetic changes from the previous version. One of the knocks against other Pocket PC PDA’s was that the operating system was not optimized for their X-scale processors. The result was that you saw very little performance differences between a 200Mhz and a 400Mhz. Well, PPC2003 changed that. Except your new H1940 is not based on the Intel X-scale processor, it’s a Samsung. But it doesn’t really matter, there isn’t much you can do with a 400Mhz that you can’t do with a 266Mhz. Either way, you won’t be rendering CAD designs on your 3.2” PDA.

So what’s not to like about the H1940? First thing is not really its fault but a fault nevertheless. The Pocket PC OS tries very hard to look and feel like your desktop Windows. Unfortunately it can never be that because of size limitations. So instead of doing what Palm does (which is very little, but does them very very well), you end up with a very robust OS but doesn’t have the interface to take advantage of it. This is not to say its unusable, quite contrary, you’ll be spending a lot of your time trying to find use for it.

Which brings me to my next point, it would be nice if HP included some “cool” software along with it. I mean, bundle some useful stuff for me to show off my new PDA to my friends. I can only so much with ‘hey, check this address book out’. And its also lacking some protective gear. Here’s a suggestion to you HP folks, sell a cool case with it! People love to protect with $300 investments! I remember the old Palm V’s got the coolest hard cases around that sold for a mere $30 (probably cost them $2 to make). But every Palm V owner bought one because they not only functioned well, they looked good too!

I know I didn’t list too many negatives about the H1940. That is not intended to reflect my overwhelming enthusiasm for the unit. I didn’t want to nit-pick on the software side of things because that has nothing to do with HP. Hardware wise, its flawless if it meets your criteria.