HP
iPAQ H6315

The HP iPAQ h6315 was a landmark device in the North American market, marketed by T-Mobile as the first Pocket PC to offer a true "triple threat" of integrated wireless connectivity out of the box. At the time, mobile professionals often relied on separate expansion cards to achieve full connectivity; the h6315 integrated quad-band GSM/GPRS, Wi-Fi (802.11b), and Bluetooth into a single unit. Building on the prestigious iPAQ lineage—a brand HP inherited through its acquisition of Compaq—the h6315 was designed to be the ultimate mobile office. Rather than forcing users into a single form factor, HP engineers took a modular approach. The device featured a large 3.5-inch TFT resistive touchscreen for traditional stylus-driven PDA navigation, but it also shipped with a unique, removable snap-on QWERTY thumb keyboard. This let users strip the device down for reading and browsing or snap the keyboard onto the bottom for intensive email sessions, directly challenging RIM BlackBerry's dominance. Internally, the device ran Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC Phone Edition, powered by a 168 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 1510 processor and 64 MB of RAM. While the processor was considered somewhat underpowered for heavy multimedia tasks compared to competing Intel XScale chips, it was chosen deliberately to preserve battery life, which was critical for a device maintaining three distinct wireless radios. It also featured a removable 1800 mAh battery, with T-Mobile offering a massive 3600 mAh extended battery for road warriors. The h6315 also embraced the emerging trend of multimedia convergence by including a built-in VGA (0.3-megapixel) rear camera, letting users capture photos and send them immediately via MMS or email over T-Mobile's GPRS network.