.KEYWORD jornada
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE A week in bed with Jornada
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Imagine a color laptop for under $1000. Now imagine it’s 2.5 pounds, runs for 10 hours on a single charge, and doesn’t need to boot up to start up. That’s the HP Jornada 820, one of the hottest new Windows CE devices around. Contributing Editor Jason Perlow, dedicated reviewer that he is, decided to test out the Jornada 820 while sick in bed. It’s a valuable and interesting article, if you can get past feeling sorry for poor Jason.
.AUTHOR Jason Perlow
I know what you’re thinking. I cheated on my wife and shacked up with a Latin temptress in a sleazy hotel.
Oh, if only it were so exciting. Instead I was struck with a severe case of pneumonia. Due to doctor’s orders, I had to spend the week, pumped up with antibiotics, away from my work as an underpaid computer consultant. I downed Sudafed, and ingested Halls Mentho-Lyptus drops by the gross and codeine-laced syrup by the gallon. I was so congested with mucus that I couldn’t go two minutes without coughing my lungs out and reeling in waves of nausea. [Thank you, Jason, for that lovely visual…you poor guy! — DG]
You would think that in my state of decrepitude, that the last thing I would want to do is sit down in front of a computer, check my email and browse the Web. You’d be right, but after about three days of sleeping for twelve hours at a time and being completely disconnected from computers, I was bored to tears. Fortunately, I didn’t have to get out of bed to maintain contact with the outside world. I had the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Jornada 820!
.H1 Inside Jornada
Weighing in at 2.5lbs, the Jornada 820, shown in Figure A, is smaller than the average ultra-light notebook. It’s perhaps the most powerful H/PC Pro device currently on the market. It’s the first H/PC to use the 190MHz Intel StrongARM RISC processor, which rivals the power and performance of desktop PCs. If that isn’t enough to make you get out of bed and rip the packaging open, it has an 8.2 inch 640 x 480 passive color LCD display, which is large enough even for those of us who have Coke-bottle lenses in their glasses. Tres cool.
.FIGPAIR A The very cool Jornada 820 is smaller than the average ultra-light notebook.
.H1 Hands-on Jornada
HP claims that the keyboard on the 820 is 90% of the size of a standard keyboard. I sort of believe that, but I also have fat fingers. I can imagine people with smaller hands really liking this keyboard, but I was unable to type on it for more than a few minutes without getting cramped. I may be asking too much — and I say this to all of the H/PC Pro vendors — if you’re going to make a notebook-sized device, find some way to put a notebook-sized keyboard in it.
Aside from the keyboard, everything else about the 820 is pure joy. The mouse is controlled by a touchpad, which I normally hate compared to eraser-head pointers and trackballs. This one was responsive and easy to control. Application performance is stellar, which should come as no surprise. It would have been nice if the unit had come with 32MB of RAM instead of 16, because it would make multi-tasking that much easier — but in the shape I was in, I was lucky to be able to move a mouse, much less multitask. The passive matrix screen, while not as bright as active matrix screens on PC laptops, is quite readable and bright enough for viewing even with a good amount of sun glare. I know this because my wife Rachel opened the blinds in the bedroom one bright afternoon, letting in enough sunlight to kill Count Dracula.
.H1 Connecting with Jornada
For connectivity, the 820 comes with a built-in 56k, v.90 modem. While I only tested this function briefly, HP includes a really nice dialup wizard, which made my ISP setup fairly easy. Compared to the times I’ve had to set up DUN/RAS (Dial-up Networking/Remote Access Services) on other Windows CE machines, this was a joy. Even though I use HotMail (which can be painfully slow) as my main email provider, Web browser performance was pleasurable. I can certainly see myself purchasing a Jornada as a surfing machine for the times I’m trapped at night in my hotel room attending some dreadful trade show or short-term consulting assignment off the beaten track. Come to think of it, it would sure come in handy when I have to go on that Brady-Bunch style family vacation with my in-laws to Disney World this spring. Maybe the pneumonia will relapse if I’m really lucky! Well, maybe not.
.H1 Plugging into Jornada
The unit has some other nice amenities, although I was unable to test some of them due to time constraints and lack of physical strength. There’s an SVGA-out port, should you need to show a PowerPoint presentation in high-resolution to an important client. Like a real laptop PC, the 820 has USB and 9-pin serial ports, as well as Type II PCMCIA and CompactFlash slots for future peripheral and memory expansion. Just for kicks, I connected up a Sierra Wireless PCMCIA cellular modem to the unit, which worked beautifully. Combined with the Jornada 820 (and about to mercilessly mix metaphors), any road warrior would be happy as a clam with this combination.
.H1 Will it be good for you?
After a week spending some very intimate time with the 820 and away from my PCs, I have to say I could certainly use it in place of a full-blown PC laptop without missing much. But keep in mind that contact management, email, Web browsing and word processing are my core applications. Once in a while, I do a PowerPoint presentation or use an Access database. For these applications, the 820 does the job quite handily.
However, if you have the absolute need to play Quake or use non-Windows CE applications on the road, this unit isn’t for you. And if you’re a real Windows CE freak, you might not want to use the Jornada as your main Windows CE machine yet. As of right now, the StrongARM processor in the 820 isn’t widely supported by third-party application vendors because the chip is too new.
That said, the 820 is still a fine machine. Who said pneumonia couldn’t be fun?
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
You can find the Jornada at http://www.hp.com/jornada/.
Get more information on the Sierra Wireless AirCard at http://www.sierrawireless.com/.
Learn more about the StrongARM processor from http://www.arm.com.
To get some chicken soup in honor of Jason, you can go to http://www.chickensoup.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Jason Perlow is a freelance writer and President of Argonaut Systems, a systems integration firm in Northern New Jersey. When he’s not suffering from respiratory distress, he can be reached via email at perlow@hotmail.com.
