The HP Jornada 820: A Great Machine!
The HP Jornada 820, is a model initially launched in 1998,
but it's still one of the greatest PDAs around,
with its unique combination of a form factor (keyboard and screen size)
fit for editing documents
and its great battery life (usable for one whole day of mobile work).
Here follows a technical description:
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It's light and small: 246 x 178 x 33 mm, 1115g
(in US units, that's 9.69 x 7.01 x 1.3 inches, 39.33oz).
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Its most prominent feature is its
8.2'' 640x480 256-color backlit LCD screen — full VGA.
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It also has a 74-key keyboard that is 90% of a fullsize keyboard,
and a 2-button touchpad as a pointing device.
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Its CPU is a 190 MHz StrongARM-1100.
(however, note that the framebuffer refresh mechanism
eats some 3.5 MW/s of memory bandwidth away from the CPU,
whereas window drawing is CPU intensive;
hence, performance may be noticeably slower than with more modern PDAs
that may have an accelerated graphics chipset.)
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It comes with 16MB of RAM.
(There exists an optional 16MB RAM expansion module F1267A,
for a 32MB total, but it is quite rare;
you probably won't find one except as installed
in an 820 already expanded to 32MB.)
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Its 16MB of ROM host Windows CE 2.11 and Pocket Office 3.0.
(This is not flash memory — it cannot be updated.
It could theoretically be replaced,
but there is little chance anyone will ever produce a Linux-friendly ROM.
Booting Linux is done from WinCE.)
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It has PCMCIA connectivity,
with one Type II PC-Card slot
and one Type II CompactFlash slot.
(The PC-Card slot is typically used with
either a modem or a network interface card
in PCMCIA format.
The only NICs for which WinCE has drivers
are NE2000 compatible ethernet cards and PROXIM compatible wireless cards.
The CF slot is typically used with either a flash memory card,
seen as an IDE disk by the computer,
or an actual microdrives harddisk.
With a 128MB or more, it is possible to hold
quite a featureful Linux distribution.)
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The machine is a USB host,
into which you can plug a mouse or any other USB device that the OS supports.
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With proper power management settings,
the batteries support over 10 hours of active operation,
which is quite impressive, and quite comfortable.
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The machine has mono sound output and input.
However (unless you modify the case) it has no jack to plug into it,
only the builtin buzzer and microphone.
It will happily play whatever MP3 music you can fit
in its memory or Compactflash.
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It has a RS232 serial port (typically used as a 115200bps console or PPP link),
and a high-speed (4Mbps) IrDA port.
The serial cable provided with the machine has a small proprietary connector
on the Jornada side, and a standard DB9 male connector for your PC.
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It sports a builtin VGA output port capable
of up to 1024x768 8bpp resolution,
in simultaneous use with the internal LCD display,
for your presentations or your monitor testing.
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Finally, the US edition has a builtin modem,
but the layers over the ADC/DAC are proprietary software,
and the modem will probably never run on Linux (who knows, though);
because of regulatory problems,
the European edition (820e) doesn't include a plug for the builtin modem,
— that's the sole difference between the editions.