HP Jornada

Me too! I remember looking at $1000 HPCs (maybe made by Casio?) at the mall in Orleans, outside of Ottawa, back in 1998 or 1999. About 10 years ago, someone put a Jornada 680 up for auction on eBay and I got it for about $6.50 CAD (plus about $20 for shipping). The battery is STILL good. The keyboard's a bit cramped, but once you use it for a few minutes, you get used to it, and it's nice for occasional note-taking, especially if you want to spend some time offline. If I ever get around to thinning the gadget herd, it's one of the few things I would keep.

I recently bought an HP Jornada that I want to explore a little further. Cool little Windows CE palmtop with great battery life.

Ah the memories! I used to run JLime and NetBSD on Jornada and MobilePro machines. While definitely not perfect, they were really nice and useable, and far more portable than contemporary laptops. You could run X11, they had PCMCIA (for wifi and extra storage), and were just such a wonderful mix of weird and useful. Glad to be reminded of those good times :)

My Dad had one of these when it was still new. With a pcmcia NIC and JLime I was able to then ssh into it. Realize this was long before PIs or Arduino's existed. I distinctly remember the feeling, while holding that Jornada in my hand, when I first SSH'd into it. I was inside the machine held in my hand.

The market is too small. I had a HP Jornada 720, and it dramatically changed how I worked. I followed the several later projects that tried to continue with small size, touch-typeable keyboard, and desktop compatible OS, but they all fizzled from lack of market interest.

Funny, I just used my Brikka coincidentally 5 min before reading this post. I think you are right. It's such a simple design and creates better espresso than most of the expensive machines that people use at home usually. Roughly made of 6 replaceable parts, backwards compatible with other Bialettis, no plastic capsule waste and easy to use. Last year I picked up a HP Jornada 720 from Ebay out of curiosity. Considering its from the year 2000 it's impressive how much it can do. The build quality is sturdy, the keyboard is amazing and the OS feels more snappy than most of my current setups. I wish they would do a reboot with better screen and wifi. I'm not sure if it's "the best-designed" thing I have ever used, but it impressed me.

It was good for mini PC like devices. Like the HP Jornada. It was just windows but mini. It totally deeply horribly sucked for phone-like devices. I used to have one from work. HTC Touch Pro 2. It had a glossy horrifically slow overlay that made things even worse but either way it was a UX nightmare. Even on my Dell Axim it wasn't great though not terribly bad either. For the time it was ok, and I read some books on it and played some games with the likes of ScummVM. But as a phone you use every day brrr. The later windows phone solved a lot of issues and it was very well liked, Microsoft just didn't give it enough time to actually take off. Some people still pine for it today.

No love lost for Windows CE per se , but the HP Jornada handheld PC that ran it was a great little note taking computer and PDA for its era (2 decades ago). Genuine all-day battery life when essentially no classic laptop could even come close.