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I've got a new toy 19 of 19 Ciao Users found the following review helpful
Rating from brianbarnes 5 Stars ()

Advantages All the feel of Windows in a pocket size ditty

Disadvantages Just a little bit pricey at the moment

For the benefit of this review I will assume that you've seen a Jornada (or a picture of) and thought "cool, I wonder what it can do." I've had mine over a week now and trust me, it's not cool! It's waay cool!!

Firstly, I have to tell you I am writing this entire review on my HP Jornada 568. Hopefully this introductory statement will go part the way to explaining it's incredible flexibility. You see, if you are used to spending half your life in the Microsoft Windows environment you will be right at home here.

But what is it? Technically speaking it's a PDA (if you don't know what a PDA is then you probably won't be buying this little number anyway), but it does a whole lot more than just handle personal data, depending on what you class as data of a personal nature. Generally I tend to think of this as telephone numbers, addresses and birthdays. Clearly this is not the case as you would need to be related to half of London to fill the 64 megs of RAM onboard the 568.

At this point you may be a little worried. Yes, unless you invest in a Compact Flash card for extra additional memory all of your workings will be saved in RAM. But you need fret not. In a way the Jornada is always switched on. There's this little power button on the front left which, well, activates the handheld. When not switched on everything is stored safely until you power up again.

Here's the neat bit. Remember I said the HP Jornada was a windows environment. Well get this. There's no boot or shut down sequence. That's right. Switch the machine of in the middle of something important and you will lose absolutely nothing. What's more, you won't have to wait an age for scandisk to run. There is no disc to scan!

This is Windows without the negatives, and that has to be good.

I'm writing this on Pocket Word. Essentially it's the same as Word but with the advanced features switched off. You've got a few basic fonts, bold italic, underline, left, right and centre align, bullets, cut, copy, paste, paragraph, find, replace, various zooms (75 to 300 percent), spell check and word count, as well as a few other machine based commands.
Input is fairly straightforward if a little slower than a regular four fingered typist (i.e.. me). There are a number of ways to write with a special stylus pen (provided and stored in it's own natty internal holder so you really shouldn't be able to lose it) directly onto the screen. Even with my shabby handwriting (just ask ciao member and work colleague "dchurch") the recognition software is pretty accurate. If you prefer to type there's a keypad on the touchscreen. If you really prefer there's a foldaway keyboard available (at a cost) but it really isn't necessary.

Then there's Pocket Excel. No surprises here. It's a watered down version of the full program, but more than operational for playing with spreadsheets on the run.

The there's basically Outlook in your back pocket. I write most of my emails away from the PC now. The search engine on the address book helps me find pizza places at the touch of a button (literally).

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brianbarnes

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Comments

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Previous page Next page Page 1 of 4 | 1 - 5 out of 19 comments
  • Nige7Whit 12/08/2003 11:00
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
  • Niknak 13/03/2003 02:09
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
  • molelover 12/05/2002 15:03
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
  • ppotter 15/04/2002 10:22
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
  • dchurch 16/03/2002 22:55
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful

    A great op Brian and so honest.....your handwriting can be THAT bad! You still won't persuade me to part with that kind of money....not unless I'm due a payrise.....lol.

Previous page Next page Page 1 of 4 | 1 - 5 out of 19 comments

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