New in Hong Kong is Hewlett-Packard's high-end iPAQ, the Pocket PC h5450, which comes loaded with wireless goodies Bluetooth, IRDA and Wi-Fi connectivity. This pocket PC's main differentiating feature in a sea of gizmos is a fingerprint reader which offers owner authentication.
HP has really raised the bar on this one. This 201-gram chunky handheld aimed clearly at corporate customers has lots of little extras built in but comes at a competitive price of HK$5,380.
The h5450 boasts the 3900 series' same sharp, 65,000-colour, transflective TFT display. Under the hood, you will find a 400 megahertz Intel XScale processor, 64 megabytes of built-in memory and a whopping 48MB of read only memory (Rom).
It also comes with a secure digital (SD) expansion slot so you can boost the memory as well as use third-party SD interfaces.
The Rom is chock-full of software extras, including the Cogent fingerprint reader and Nevo Universal Remote software, which allows the device to work as a universal remote control.
The only thing this handheld lacks is a phone feature, but you can use a Bluetooth phone with it.
We had a little demonstration of the fingerprint-security feature, and it is pretty impressive. The software allows you to choose the level of security you would like, including a personal identification number (PIN) and fingerprint reading setting or just fingerprint alone. You can choose to have all 10 fingers kept in memory in the event you lose some of them.