Now, if you’ve seen my Psion Series 3a article and you actually lusted after such machines, you might well have salivated enough over this beast to drown a small elephant. If you’ve never seen one before, I’ll run through a few of its vitals…

It’s an HP Jornada 728, born in the year 2002 AD, and at $1000 a pop brand new they were certainly among the very cream of the crop, being the top dog among the other Jornadas, which replaced the earlier LX series of MSDOS handhelds from HP.

Like the Psion, it’s a clamshell style device, but it’s considerably more modern in both form and function. One immediately obvious difference is the ludicrously wide (8:3!) resistive touchscreen LCD dominating the top half of the open device, containing within it 640×240 16-bit colour pixels. The keyboard features proper laptop-style keys, albeit quite small ones, that are quite pleasant to type on. If typing isn’t so much your thing, you can scribble on the screen with its stylus if you prefer, which works reasonably well but for the keyboard being exactly where your wrist wants to be. It should keep you computing for most of a day, the 1150mAh lithium ion stick attached to its backside should last about 8 hours or so of actual use, depending on what you’re doing with it. Don’t forget to keep a fresh coin cell in the backup battery recepticle too, otherwise anything you didn’t copy to CompactFlash will mysteriously vanish as your Jornada gets a bit forgetful.

It’s no slouch when it comes to the guts though, packing a 206MHz Intel StrongARM CPU with 64MB RAM to back it up (I’ve had desktop PCs with less sack), along with a 32MB ROM to hold the CE-based Microsoft Windows Handheld PC 2000 operating system. Expansion options galore adorn the case, from the 16-bit Type II PC Card and smartcard slots in the left hand side to the Type I CompactFlash door hiding away in the bottom that’ll happily hold cards up to a solid 32GB. For those connected types there’s a 56k modem in there too so you can dial up on the move just as long as you’re near a phone line. If that’s not good enough, you can shove a wifi, bluetooth or GSM/EDGE card in the PC Card hole and get your wireless on either by tethering to something else which has a connection or dialling directly into the mobile airwaves. Oh, and there’s a serial port on the back too, along with a 115k IrDA infrared port. To sync the thing, you’ll probably want to drop it in its docking station, which connects to your PC via a USB cable and talks ActiveSync, so it won’t work on  modern Windows versions. Long live Windows 2000!

So what does this thing do? Well, it’s got all sorts of neat stuff, not least a full and functioning copy of Microsoft Office which allows you to create and edit all your favourite document types. That’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook. That’s gotta be worth something on its own, right? No? Well then, it’s got a voice recorder, you can play games on it, you can browse the web with Internet Explorer, play music with Media Player and watch videos too, you can do pretty much anything with it really, but you might want to stock up on applications first. Windows CE has a huge catalogue of 3rd party applications, it’s almost difficult to not find what you need. Well, unless you need something modern, that is. If, like many, you’re allergic to Windows CE and its stretch-named derivatives, you can quite simply install Linux on this thing if you have a spare CompactFlash card to stuff it on. Linux for the Jornada comes in the form of jLime and Debian, among a couple of others, and while I’ve not yet had a chance to test it, it looks decent enough. I imagine it would pair quite nicely with a 3G card. What’s not to like about an always-connected “pocket sized” Linux terminal?

So what’s the score, is it any good? Well, it’s not any bad, let’s put it that way. It pales a bit compared to what even a low end smartphone is capable of these days, but it does have the strength of having a pretty tip-top keyboard. It’s a bit chunky to be honest, you need big pockets, and even then you’re going to look a bit stupid. It puts my Asus eeepc netbook to shame when it comes to battery life, it’s got a battery pack the size of a couple of AA batteries and yet it lasts almost 3 times as long. I cannot tell a lie nor omit a truth, I only really bought one because I always wanted one as a kid. As I was dragged mercilessly around the electronics shop under the command of one or more parents looking for some dull appliance or other, I would catch a brief glimpse of these babies sitting in what might as well have been called the “you can’t afford this stuff” section. Well, now I can, so take that, nyeh.

£60/$90

At this point I would ask you to forgive any mis-typing I do, because as much as it looks like this machine has a touchscreen like its more powerful and younger brothers, it doesn’t, but some part of me doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that fact and so I keep jabbing the LCD, my fingers are unappreciative. Instead of a touchscreen, though, it has a pretty decent QWERTY keyboard. Being so small, it’s quite easy to fat-finger it if you’re not used to it, but it doesn’t take too much getting used to if you use it often enough. Mine’s a little bit squidgy, but I’m willing to put some of that down to the fact that it’s about 2 years short of a couple of decades old. That strip below the screen allows you to jump directly to a particular application by prodding the appropriate icon, though it provides no tactile feedback when you do so, it’s quite hard to do it by accident. The screen isn’t half bad, indoors at least, I’ve yet to try and use it outside but when it’s not in direct sunlight it has very good clarity and contrast. The display resolution is decent enough, pretty reasonable for its age. All in all I think it’s quite sufficient.

Naturally you’ll need some storage to put all the files you’ve thunked out on your pocket miracle, and predictably this device has some. There’s 512KB of RAM built in, 357KB of which is currently free and automatically assigned to a RAM disk (drive I, so says the PDA) where you can save your files. Now, the more alert among you might note that the aforementioned storage is RAM and that there is a fatal flaw to this storage method. No power, no data, your handy pocket pal suddenly contracts RAMnesia and you didn’t write down that important speech you just killed the batteries writing. A common flaw with many PDAs of the time, actually, but there is a coin cell installed to power the memory so if the main batteries do die then you’re not immediately up the creek without a luggable. If you prefer something a little less precarious though there are two expansion slots, one on either end, in which you can install memory cartridges. There are two types of memory cartridges, one of which is similar to the internal memory and requires another coin cell to retain its contents but the other is flash based and does not, though it does require periodic formatting because deleted and old copies of revised files continue to use space on the card even though you can no longer access them. Another optional extra was a 3.5″ floppy disk drive capable of using regular 720KB/1.44MB floppy disks but the drive was larger than the PDA itself, hampering portability somewhat. As I mentioned batteries just now, I should point out that besides the coin cell present for data retention, the main power comes from a pair of easily replaceable AA batteries, and a fresh pair will get you somewhere in the region of 20-30 hours of runtime.

Importantly, the software, little use is the lump of plastic without. The OS and included applications are remarkably responsive, doing exactly what you say, when you say. I’ve never seen this thing hang, freeze, get confused, refuse to boot, turn off unexpectedly or otherwise misbehave, it’s solid as a rock encased in concrete dusted with diamond powder. There’s a menu system throughout, accessible via the Menu key, which pops up at the top of the screen and can be navigated using the arrow keys, it also lists shortcut keys which can be used without accessing the menu first, usually consisting of the Psion key and an alphanumeric key. The home screen has scrollable application icons lined up for your perusal and bringing up the menu system here allows you to install or remove applications, work with storage devices and files residing upon them, you can format, copy, perform complete backups, etc. Other menus allow you to check disk, memory and battery stats, owner information and general OS/application information, connect to printers and modems and work with passwords. There are third party and homebrew apps but I currently have no way to install them since I’m missing the serial cable required to sync data to and from the 3a, also available are data cards that install in the memory card slots with read-only applications on them but I don’t have any of those either. If for some crazy reason you’d prefer to run a subset of Linux on a Series 3 over the ROM-based EPOC, you can do that too. It’s not the full Linux experience because the CPU simply isn’t capable of running it, but a cut down version has been ported and is available free.

I do plan to keep this little beast, it’s not the most useful device I own, but being a key player in the development of digital personal organisers in the latter part of the last century I feel that Psion more than deserve to be remembered, so in the collection of PDAs I plan to build the 3a has earnt its place. You might hear more about that collection as time progresses, if that’s your thing, stay tuned.

£2/$3