HP's not-for-US iPAQ 614 gets reviewed

There's nothing quite as profoundly unsettling as reading a review about a phone you can't have. For Americans, that's an all-too-common experience -- and thanks to the ongoing Qualcomm / Broadcom drama, even phones that had originally been destined for the colonies have been unceremoniously dropped, destined for regions well beyond the reaches of the legal system. Case in point: HP had originally wanted to bring the interesting iPAQ 610 series here, but backed off at the last second. If you really want one, though, you can still finagle one from an importer -- not to mention that countless Windows Mobile fanatics populate areas of the globe friendlier to HP's latest pocket candy -- so Tracy and Matt's Blog took a close look at the 614c, which is now shipping. Although the reviewer found its Windows Mobile 6 load to be plenty speedy, he also discovered that it was a tad on the chunky side -- not to mention that the 3G radio seemed to be way flaky, the screen is too inset to use entirely stylus-free, and the virtual nav wheel embedded in the keypad (arguably the ace up the 610's sleeve) wasn't much fun to use. Nice try, HP, but on second thought, maybe we're not so broken up that you're keeping it out of the States.