[geeks] HP Journada 720 - $75 (Refurbished, after rebate)

[velociraptor]

On 8/10/06, Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 10:13:15AM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> > I used to have a NEC MobilePro 790 that I really liked and I was
> > wondering how the speed of the 206MHz StrongARM in the Jornada compares
> > with the 168MHz VR4121 in the MobilePro?
>
> Roughly equivalent to a P90 in performance. Not the same instruction set,
> some things are a lot slower. If you tried to run an X86 emulator on it,
> it would be 286/16 or 386/SX16.
>
> The best I could ever do on a 500mHz one with an X86 emulator was to
> get Duke Nukem (the original almost text graphics) game running.
> Many MAME games will run. It might have trouble with MP3's depending
> upon the exact player you run. No real video playback.
>
> If you want a low resolution, hard to use X-terminal with ssh over WiFi
> it would work.
>
> Just before I read this, I blogged about something similar and a use for
> it.

I replaced the other half's Palm that went belly up and my own Treo
600 with two HP iPaq 2215's.  I checked into the possibility of Linux,
but to be honest, I haven't been tempted.  Other than getting a bad
battery in one initially, they have been very well behaved.  And with
a native Nethack binary, I don't have much else to ask for--and it
performs fine.

It has BlueTooth, but no WiFi (though it supports SDIO), so if I want
connectivity, I'd be more likely to slave it to my Nokia phone that
has BT and EDGE.

The pair ran me $350 shipped off of ePay, with 2x PDAs, 2x thumb
keyboards, 2x 256MB SD cards, and all original accessories.  The only
thing I added on was screen protectors.  I'd like a USB sync/charge
cable, but battery life is good so I haven't sprung for it yet.

My main use has been reading ebooks, and "mindless games" while
listening to podcasts (I can't read and listen to podcasts at the same
time).  It does seem to have problems with large ebooks (e.g. the 5th
Harry Potter book, for example, 700+ pgs) in MS Reader (presumably
trying to load the whole thing into memory or something equally
stupid).  I haven't tried any other readers yet.  The Acroread for
PDAs (both Palm and Pocket Windows) sucks absolute canal water.

=Nadine=