HP iPAQ 600 Business Navigator Series (video)

HP officially announced the iPAQ 600 Business Navigator Series tonight. The new iPAQ 600 is a Quad-band, 3G smartphone with GPS navigation. This phone is all business and certified to work with popular enterprise applications.

Designed for single handed use, the iPAQ 600 features a clickwheel that’s imbeded in the numberpad. The clickwheel works well, and anyone who uses an iPod will feel right at home.

We got a chance to sit down with Raj Bhavani, an iPAQ product manager and take a close look at the iPAQ 610, the first device in the iPAQ 600 series.

The iPAQ 600 series has a 2.8-inch 280×320 pixel display. A 3.0MP camera is built in and photos can be uploaded directly to Snapfish, HP’s photo sharing service.

The iPAQ 600 can be tethered to your notebook to take advantage of its high speed mobile broadband service. Both a Bluetooth and 802.11 b/g antenna are included.

It comes with mobile versions of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Google Maps is used for point to point directions via the intergrated GPS.

HP says the battery will go for 7 to 8 hours of usage.

The 610 will support VOIP and PBX systems from AVAYA, CISCO, Nortel and others.

It would be nice to have a higher resolution display. There are more features than you can shake a stick at, and usability may end up suffering because of this. Flexibility is nice, but there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, there are three ways to navigate through menus -clickwheel, touchscreen and side buttons.

For those who want a QWERTY keypad the iPAQ 900 series will be available soon. The iPAQ 900 is very similar to the 600 series except for the keypad.

The iPAQ 610 will be sold unlocked. HP hopes to gain global carrier support in the near future.