Touchscreen PDA-phones with exposed QWERTY keyboards have a tiny problem--they have square screens. This applies to the popular Treo series from Palm and also the hw-series of devices from HP. We have nothing against geometrical constructs with sides of equal lengths, but compared to the more common rectangular QVGA displays, the square ones lack screen real estate. BenQ's P50 and P51 did come with QVGA displays, but we suspect if there will be any more such products from the company after the purchase of Siemens Mobile turned out to be a flop.

This is why the HP iPaq 912 Business Messenger is a breath of fresh air. Okay, you may get a little out of breath if you read its longwinded name out loud, but we are talking about its form factor with the landscape-oriented display. We had a feel of this new PDA-phone when HP held a launch event recently, and here are our thoughts.

Pros

The 912 has all the wireless options a business user may need including HSDPA, Wi-Fi and quadband GSM. Travelers will especially appreciate its breadth of connectivity tools, and in true iPaq fashion, HP has customized its Windows Mobile 6 Professional Today screen to make sure that they can all be quickly accessed.

Another wireless feature in the 912 is GPS. This particular handheld uses the SiRFstar III chip, the same one found in the Dopod U1000 and Mio A501, both of which we've tested to have good navigation capabilities.

At 146g and 16mm thick, the 912 isn't exactly compact. But it compares well with others like the HTC TyTN II which is 190g and the Palm Treo 750 which is 21mm thick.

With 128MB of RAM and a Marvell 520MHz processor, this PDA-phone should prove to be quite a workhorse. For storage purposes, it comes with 256MB of flash ROM and a microSD slot for expansion.

Cons

When fiddling around with the keyboard, we found it to be much too stiff. The layout and spacing are fine, but because you have to press hard to get a response, it will surely slow down typing of text messages and emails. Hopefully, this will be rectified before it gets released in the market.

Bottomline

Like the 612 which we previewed earlier, the HP iPaq 912 Business Messenger will be available in Q4 2007 for US$599 for the basic model. Different bundles which include maps and car kits will also be available for slightly more. There will also be a non-camera version but this may be available slightly later.