HP iPaq Glisten (photos)

It's been well over a year since we've seen an HP smartphone for the U.S. market, but the company's back with the HP iPaq Glisten, a new messaging smartphone for AT&T. It's available now for $179.99 with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate.

The iPaq Glisten doesn't offer a lot of bells and whistles, but will provide business users with the most-essential tools. The smartphone runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Edition and supports the full range of wireless options.

The iPaq Glisten measures 2.48 inches wide by 4.45 inches high by 0.52 inch thick and weighs 5.29 ounces. The smartphone is on the wider side so it's a bit of a handful when on a phone call and can be a tight fit in a pants pocket.

The iPaq Glisten features a 2.5-inch AMOLED touch screen, which should be one of the smartphone's highlights since AMOLED displays are brighter, sharper, and consume less power than standard LCDs. However, it has such a low resolution that you don't really see any of the benefits. In addition, the smaller screen size doesn't bode well for the touch user interface.

Aside from the touch screen, you do get a few navigation controls, including Talk and End keys, a Start menu launcher, an OK button, and a directional keypad.

The HP iPaq Glisten has an easy-to-use full QWERTY keyboard. It features large, domed buttons with clear lettering and ample backlight, so we had very little problem using the keyboard.

On the right side of the smartphone, you'll find a 3.5mm headphone jack and a Micro-USB port.

On back, you'll find the smartphone's 3.1-megapixel camera. It offers up to 5x digital zoom, various camera settings, and video-recording capabilities, and HP includes a mobile version of its Photosmart software so you can edit photos right on your device.

Picture quality could definitely be better. There's a bit of shutter lag, so even though we held the phone still after pressing the capture key, more often than not, we ended up with a blurry image.

The HP iPaq Glisten offers 256MB SDRAM/512MB Flash but has a microSD expansion slot behind the battery door that can accept up to 32GB cards.