Compaq iPAQ

» see hp.com/ipaq as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the ipaq was the kind of device i remember from boardrooms and trade-show booths in ankara more than from the desks of anyone i actually knew. by the time i was a computer engineering student in 2003, a pocket pc cost more than my monthly rent and ran software i did not need. pdas in turkey were for managers and consultants. they were not what an undergrad on a dial-up connection at home would buy.

compaq launched the ipaq h3600 in april 2000, with a 240 by 320 color lcd and 32 megabytes of ram, plus a slot for accessory jackets that added wireless or gps. the early units were aimed at the same enterprise market as the palm pilot but ran microsoft's pocket pc operating system, which let them sync with outlook on a desktop and run cut-down versions of office. business buyers were the customer that mattered. consumer adoption was secondary.

hp's 2002 acquisition of compaq absorbed the ipaq into hp's mobile portfolio. the line continued for another seven years across multiple sub-series, with the h1xxx as the budget option and the h5xxx as the business top tier. the final ipaq, the glisten, shipped in december 2009 on windows mobile 6.5. production ended in 2010 as hp shifted attention to the palm webos acquisition that would itself collapse a year later. by 2013 hp had retired all the brand names it had inherited from compaq, ipaq included.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the ipaq's competitive advantage in 2000 was that it was a windows-on-your-pocket device for people who already lived in outlook and office on the desktop. palm and handspring were ahead at the consumer end with simpler, longer-battery-life devices. the ipaq was heavier and slower-booting than its competitors, but it ran the windows ce subset that enterprise it departments could already manage. for buyers whose entire workflow was windows, that mattered more than the form-factor disadvantages.

~ the inheritance ~

the iphone launched in june 2007 and redefined what a pocket computer was. the ipaq team kept shipping for two and a half more years against a market that was already moving to a different platform. the glisten in december 2009 was the last unit and the cleanest evidence that the line had become a holding pattern. nobody bought a glisten over an iphone 3gs in december 2009. the windows mobile pocket pc line as a whole was discontinued by microsoft itself in 2010, replaced by windows phone 7, which had its own short and unhappy story to tell.

~ the long tail ~

the ipaq is the kind of object that turns up in old electronics drawers across enterprise offices in the early 2010s, alongside ethernet cables and ibm thinkpad chargers nobody throws away. retro tech writers occasionally pull one out for a 2020s review and find that the screen is still readable and the buttons still work, since the build quality of business handhelds in that era was unusually solid. the software is unrecoverable. windows mobile 6.5 cannot reach any modern service because the certificates expired and the protocols have moved on, which leaves the unit as a calendar that knows what year it was last booted in.

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