Technologists have talked the talk about mobile device convergence for the last couple of years, but the iPAQ hw6915 does its best to walk the walk. The technology, particularly GPS satellite positioning, is now sufficiently miniaturised to produce a machine without bulky fold-out aerials or the need to clip on an extra battery pack or link via Bluetooth.

The internal GPS receiver seems sensitive enough without an external aerial and, together with the supplied Tom Tom maps, provides motoring-scale detail of the whole country and a single, more detailed map based around a town or city of your choice.

The iPAQ hw6915 is a little bigger than a typical mobile, but not as chunky as the old Blackberry-style messenger that was one of the first to have a full QWERTY keyboard. This device has such a keyboard and, as long as your fingers aren't too big, you can use it instead of the on-screen keyboard and stylus for writing e-mails and text messages.

There's more to the device than GPS, though, as it has a 1.3-megapixel camera built into its back. Turn the PDA sideways and press a button on its side - which doubles as a camera power switch and shutter release - and you have a 76mm LCD screen for the digital camera. Picture quality is as good as most camera phones and you can record videos, too.

Then there's the quad-band phone built into the device. The iPAQ is small enough to hold up to your ear when making a call, or you can pair it with a Bluetooth headset. Both Bluetooth and WiFi are built in, so you can hook straight into a wireless network through any available hotspot.

Finally, of course, the iPAQ hw6915 is a Windows Mobile PDA, with Word, Excel and Powerpoint in pocket versions. You can e-mail from it and play back all manner of music files. There's a slot for a Mini SD card, which can provide up to 1GB of extra storage, to add to the 192MB provided internally.

The only downer is that the manual warns there's no specific way to turn off the GPS receiver, which consumes battery power. This is a bit lame, as other devices, including a GPS phone we've been using for a year or so, manage this without problem. The way to do it on the iPAQ, according to HP, is to turn off any applications which make use of GPS, but this is fiddly. Even with the GPS unused, a couple of hours playing Bubble Breaker was enough to have the machine crying for its cradle.

Verdict
This is the kind of handheld device that most phone and PDA owners have been hoping for. While it's still at an early-adopter price - hopefully this will drop before long - it succeeds in combining PDA, phone, GPS and camera in a single, easy-to-use device with all the right connections. Be wary about the battery life, though.

Company: HP

Contact: 0845 270 4222

Tags: global positioning system minisd ipaq gps navigation device personal digital assistant gps wireless bluetooth