HP offers mobile with voice prompts
Here's a phone that might make the IT guy or gal at your office a little happier.
HP unveiled the iPaq 500 series (the first will be called the HP iPaq 510 in the U.S.), a smart phone that offers remote access in addition to the usual trimmings. So if you leave it in a cab, IT can remote delete all those secret company files you leave on it.
The phone runs on the new Windows Mobile 6 platform that comes with Mobile Outlook, Mobile IE, etc. HP opted for the numeric keyboard (to keep it small perhaps) but offers over 20 voice prompting features to make up for its lack of a QWERTY. You can also reply to e-mails with a voice message.
The iPaq 500 connects to the Internet using GSM/GPRS/Edge networks, and Wi-Fi that works with WPA2 security. It also does VoIP.
And believe it or not, the time has come to start measuring storage on cell phones. HP's iPaq 500 has 128MB of storage with a microSD card slot to expand. The phone offers Bluetooth and will let you play music, videos, photos and games. The battery is good for 6 hours talk, or about 7 days of laying around.
No word yet on which phone companies the iPaq 500 will work with. The company has also decline to reveal pricing and an exact availability date, though "this spring" was mentioned in the announcement that came out of the 3GSM World Congress 2007 in Barcelona.
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
