Can you upgrade the ROM of a Sharp Mobilon HC-4600?

And...it's a pretty solid machine...at least my 4600 felt well built. But I never had very good longevity with the NiMH battery. As a touch typist, the key colors never made any difference to me in use, but I went from the 4600 to the Jornada 690 and loved the HP keyboard...but missed the clear color screen I had on the Sharp machine.

The two main problems with most of the HC series of Mobilon's is the lack on a Compact Flash slot, and poor battery life. Now, if you have the serial cable (and a serial port on your PC), or a PCMCIA to CF converter you can survive that problem. And as for the battery? Well, I'm sticking my HPC's on charge all the time, so for me the small faults suit me well.

As for the 'back to keyboards' bit, I find typing on a Jornada a little bizzare as when I type something and I'm not looking at the keyboard, the keys are close together so I will sometimes press two accidently. Even so the keys feel great, and when I type something I so commonly type (for example: Google!), the keys are top notch. The way the keyboard feels gets worse when you are typing at an angle, but this is I guess usual with most keyboards.

Edited by Paspie 2009-06-26 3:15 AM

Sharp's reluctant upgrade chip was fairly unstable. You had to reset the HC-4600 quite frequently, and often you had to run a "hard" reset, which wiped all RAM off the chip. I tried a couple of the Windows CE 2.11 upgrade chips but reverted to the Windows 2.0 32-megabyte version. Much more reliable.