Sunday, April 18th, 2021

A tale about Jornadas
=====================

Two things happened recently in my handheld computer/PDA collection
(well, more than two, but I want to talk about two of them):

1. I sold my Sagemcom Spiga. My original intention was to use it when
commuting, but due to the pandemic, I didn't use any public transport
since the last September. The Spiga was since then mostly lying in
the drawer of my desk, its batteries slowly deteriorating so when
I found someone who will actually use it, I simply let it go. When
all of this is over and I will once again start to spend twice a day
half an hour in the underground, I have some other devices to use.
For example - a couple of months ago I found an Acer Aspire ZG5 in
the trash and albeit not as small as the Spiga and not equipped with
a touchscreen, for programming and typing on the go it's perfectly
usable.

2. As a coincidence I also got two HP Jornada machines: The 720, 
a Windows CE based device of almost the same form factor as the
Spiga, just older and slower. For $60 with original packaging, two
spare stylus pens, two batteries, docking station, and an add-on CF
GPS, I couldn't resist. The other Jornada is the 565, one of the
first PocketPC PDAs, before HP decided to name the line iPaq. This
one was for free from one of my friends, also with full original
packaging and what's even better also with the HP Pocket CompactFlash
Camera.

You know, I always kind of hated the Windows CE / Windows Mobile
devices. The system itself was bad but much worse was, what Microsoft
did. In 1995 they conquered the desktop with Windows 95 and turned
their attention to the handheld computer market. That area was
divided between several vendors, the probably best and biggest was
Psion with their Series 3/3a. The minimal specs for devices with
WinCE 1.0 were several times higher than what Psion had (modern 32bit
RISC CPUs like MIPS or Hitachi SH3 versus the NEC V30H which is 
essentially an Intel 8088 clone), yet they were incredibly sluggish.
The combined power of Microsoft and hardware manufacturers like HP,
NEC, Casio, or Philips was for Psion hard to fight with, so even
the ARM-based Series 5 and much powerful (and also bigger) Series 7,
the end came in 2003 when Psion ceased to produce handheld with their
own OS (which was later rebranded as Symbian and the rest is probably
well known).

And how did Microsoft celebrate this victory? They declared the
market of clamshell handheld computers as dead and focused to the PDA
market where they repeated the very same story, but this time with
Palm Inc. One of the first devices in this era was the Jornada 565.
It's internally almost the same as the Jornada 720 - the same CPU
(Intel StrongARM SA-1100 206 MHz), the same amount of RAM (32 MB),
just a bit newer system core, and different GUI reflecting the
different form factor. Any Palm PDA of the same era (~2003) didn't
have such hardware, yet was usually more responsive and pleasant to
use. But again, PocketPC won - even though not for a long time,
because the era of standalone PDA devices was almost over, but
victory it was.

I always liked Psion and Palm devices more. I didn't use Windows as
my primary system on desktop since at least 2002, so I had no need to
do so on the go. But now all these tiny computers are equally
obsolete, so I decided to give them a try. Right now I'm typing this
in MS PocketWord on the Jornada 720 just to give the battery one full
discharge cycle. It arrived totally dead, giving exactly 0.0V, but
connecting it for a second to more than double of the nominal voltage
brought it back to life. The second battery that was in the box works
OK.

There are two things I want to try in the near future: the FreePascal
cross-compiler able to produce Windows CE 3 binaries and the NetBSD,
which still supports Jornada as a tier 1 device in the current
release, kind of unbelievable. 

This seems to be the end of what I wanted to say today and the
battery still holds. Good.  And while it's holding:

PS/1: To illustrate how "fast" the first generations of Windows CE
based handhelds were: I have in my collection an HP 360LX from 1997.
It has a 60MHz Hitachi SH3 CPU, yet it is really sluggish. Almost
everything needs one or two seconds to be drawn on the screen, even
simple tapping of the Start menu. But what is really absurd is the
Czech translation of the system. As all system files are in ROM and
therefore read-only, the translation (which is a 3rd party app)
searches for English strings to translate after they are drawn on
the screen and then re-draws them with the Czech equivalent. With
translation, everything doesn't take one or two seconds to draw,
but more like six or seven. The machine is completely unusable this
way. No such problems were ever encountered on my Psion Series 3a
with the same CPU that was in the very first PC-XT clones, clocked
just bellow 8 MHz.

PS/2: I managed to make the HP CF camera work and took one picture
just out of the window of our flat, you can find it in the phlog
directory. The good thing is, that it has a (manual) focus lens, so
you can actually decide what you want to photograph. The bad thing
is, that it needs the HP Camera app, which is in the ROM of Jornada
565 and cannot be transferred to another device ("You cannot copy
files or programs contained in the ROM."). 

And battery still has some 20 % left. Very good indeed...