HP iPAQ rx3715

There was a time when we got excited if a PDA played back music, but the rx3715 goes way beyond this humble skill: HP wants it to be the centrepiece of your home-entertainment system. Rather than be faced with the normal Pocket PC 'home' page, the first sight on switching on the rx3715 is a quartet of media-oriented buttons: one for Photos, one for a PhotoSmart camera, one called Mobile Media and one for Home Control.

Press Photos and you're taken to HP's Image Zone software, which is a pumped-up image viewer. From here, you can email photos and videos, print them, view them as slide shows, move them to different folders or an SD card, even see their histograms.

If you want to actually take photos, you press the PhotoSmart camera button, or use the hardware button that sits on the left-hand side of the iPAQ (where a voice-recorder button would normally be). HP has made ease-of-use an absolute priority here, with intuitive onscreen buttons to activate the digital zoom and to control settings; these include white balance, metering and exposure compensation. Sensibly, the hardware camera button also acts as a shutter button, so you simply have to frame your subject and press it.

Where things become annoying is the inordinate shutter lag, which is made all the worse by HP's sound effects. The iPAQ clicks to register the pressing of the button and then delays for about a second until it makes a shutter sound - only then has your photo been taken, by which time your subject has probably moved on. It's a 1.3-megapixel camera, with a maximum resolution of 1,280 x 960 and, providing light conditions are good, you should be happy with the results.

Naturally, the rx3715 takes videos too. There's a choice of two formats, with H.263 supporting sizes up to 176 x 144, while the more natural choice of Motion JPEG (AVI) goes up to 320 x 240. The results are certainly good enough to view on a website, or on the 320 x 240 screen of the rx3715 itself, but quality is rather disappointing.

HP is also making a big thing of Home Control, which is essentially Nevo 2. This makes those 4-in-1 remote controls seem like relics from a long-lost world, with its ability to control hundreds of makes of TV, videos, DVD players, PVRs and even Media Center PCs. Special functions such as Teletext can be learnt from your existing remote controls, and you can switch between users and rooms and even set up 'Favorites' for your most frequently used satellite channels.

But the feature that HP is making the biggest marketing fuss about is its Mobile Media centre. At its most basic, this grabs all the media files sitting in your My Documents folder - music, videos and pictures - and provides a simple way to navigate between them all. You can then switch to another folder, or the SD card, if you prefer.

Where it becomes a little more interesting is if you have a wireless network setup. If so, you can use the bundled copy of NevoMedia Server on a PC loaded with music, and then access it on the device. We've seen it work in practice, but HP couldn't supply us with the software in time for this review, so unfortunately we can't say for sure how easy it is to set up. From past experience of such software, though, we suspect it takes some time and effort.

Even if it's simpler than we suspect, a cynic might argue: 'so what?' How many people are really that desperate to listen to their music collection wherever they are in their home? Surely, if you're that interested in music then you'll have bought a 40GB MP3 player by now, and simply synchronise it with your music collection. We remain unconvinced, but at least you have the option.