Greyscale H/PCs

Well, summer is almost here and the sun is bright, at least in my part of the world. With talk lately on HPC:Factor about greyscale H/PCs, I figure it’s time to dust off a few and offer up some thoughts for the benefit of those who might be thinking of getting one.

KEYBOARDS
By using these small, greyscale H/PCs you don’t have to settle for sore fingers from typing on cramped keyboards. There are two alternatives. The first is NewtonKey. It’s a program and hardware solution that allows you to connect a Newton keyboard to an H/PC. The second is an iBIZ keyboard. This one is simply a driver for the H/PC and attaching the sync cable from the H/PC to the keyboard. It also ruins on three AAA batteries so you don’t drain your H/PC. Both are good solutions if you plan on writing the next Great Canadian, British, American, Brazilian, etc. novel. It’s also a two part solution and means that you have to carry both the H/PC and the keyboard (and cable(s)).

BATTERIES
It’s best for the environment if you use rechargeables. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well use a solar charger. Doing it this way, you can stay away from a power outlet all summer. I also carry non-rechargeable backups. I use Lithium AA batteries because of the shelf life. They also give you an incredibly long run time if you need to use them. Just watch for and heed the low-battery warning. Lithium AAs die very quickly after you see the warning.

LIVING IN 8 MEGS OF RAM WHILE HAVE ONLY ONE CARD SLOT
Some of these H/PCs have only 8 megs of RAM. That can get a little tricky if you install a lot of programs and want to use a modem or Wi-Fi card in the only slot. It’s something you’re going to have to think about. I recommend putting system patches and modem/Wi-Fi drivers, fax software (if you use a fax) on internal RAM and everything else on the card. That way you can still communicate externally when the comm card is in the slot.

And now for thoughts on the various H/PCs I’ve used:

VELO 500
It’s got a built-in modem which can be useful. It also comes with a lot of extra built-in software like a database, fax software, unit conversion, voice recording, a character utility so you can enter odd characters if you need to. The backlight is very bright.
It comes with 16 megs of RAM (and I’ve read there is a 24-meg version but have never seen one).
On the negative side it uses miniature cards, not CF or PCMCIA cards, in the main unit. These cards are rare and unless you have the drivers installed, they won’t work. You can’t make a backup of the system and put it in a miniature card and hope to restore the Velo from a hard reset.
To use PCMCIA cards, or CF cards with an adapter, you need to find the PCMCIA module. If you thought finding the miniature cards was hard, try finding one of these. It attaches to the bottom of the Velo and allows the use of PCMCIA cards. When attached, it also makes the Velo almost 1 and ½ inches thick.
I also found the keyboard keys too small. They’re oval shaped and rounded, allowing your fingers to slip easily when using them.

COMPAQ C-SERIES 810
This one comes with some really good built-in software, including a system-wide spell checker/macro ulility and dictionary all rolled into one app, Quick Notes, Pocket BizCalc, voice recording and backup/restore software.
It has a built-in modem.
It’s backlight is extremely bright.
The base unit has 8 megs of RAM, but that’s easily expandable to 20 megs.
One the negative side are the keyboard keys. They’re like tiny, round calculator keys. As one reviewer once said, they look like Aspirins and you’ll likely need to take two Aspirin after using them to enter anything but short notes.
The other minus is that it only has one PCMCIA slot.

HP 360LX
In addition to the regular Windows CE software this comes with bSQUARE pro fax software as well as a data backup/restore utility. It also has what is probably the best power control panel I’ve used. With it, you can recharge NiCd or NiMH without doing any surgery to the batteries.
It has a nice, bright, white backlight.
It has both a PCMCIA and a CF slot so you can a memory card while using a modem or Wi-Fi card. Nice.
The keyboard keys aren’t too bad. They’re slightly rectangular and sloped. You may not want to write long passages on it, but the keys won’t kill your fingers.
I’ve never found any drawbacks using the 360. Nice machine.

SHARP MOBILON HC-4100
This is one of my three favourites.
It comes with two extra built-in programs, a voice recorder and an image editor.
The 4100 has a total of 12 megs of RAM to work with.
It has a built-in modem.
The backlight is bright.
The keyboard on this one is a delight. The keys are rectangular and flat, but they’re spaced far enough apart that you can actually touch type on them.
Sharp, at one time, offered a WinCE 2.11 upgrade for this machine. It’s very rare and I’ve only ever seen one on eBay, and that was years ago.
One the minus side, it has only one PCMCIA slot.

CASIO CASSIOPEIA A-20
It’s a pretty basic machine.
The backlight on this one is very bright.
The keys are rectangular and flat. They’re close together so you may not be able to touch type on them, but they do feel nice so you won’t be killing your fingers.
There are two slots, one PCMCIA and one CF.
On the negative side is the CF slot. Due to its design, it can only be used for memory cards. There is a small pin that the cover pushes in to activate the slot. This means you must hold the pin in or wedge something in there to activate the slot if you plan to use anything other than a memory card with the slot cover off.

CASIO CASSIOPEIA A-22T
Most of what I’ve written about the Casio A-20 applies to the A-22T. Among the differences are that it has no sound or backlighting. It does have 16 megs of RAM and an additional two megs of built in flash memory.


CASIO CASSIOPEIA PA-2400U-CF
I bought this one recently and was very pleasantly surprised with how useful it’s proven to be. It’s turned out to be one of my three favourites.
It’s a tablet and thus doesn’t have a built in keyboard. But either on its own or when pared with an iBIZ keyboard it can be a potent machine.
The screen is not the standard 640x240, but 480x240. This makes everything just a little larger on the screen, thus making it very easy on the eyes.
It comes with built in voice recording software as well as a suite of software from Art Inc.
You can use a built-in, on-screen keyboard, invoked by pressing a button, or turn to the built-in voice recognition or hand writing software. So far, I’ve only toyed with the last two, but they seem to work as advertised. Both are trainable to your speech or handwriting style.
The backlight is very bright.
One the negative side is the screen size. Not everything will work on this screen, although I’ve found substitutes for the programs I normally use.
The other negative is the CF slot. It, like the Casio A-20 and A-22T uses a pin for activation.


NEC MOBILEPRO 700
This one is my favourite. I comes with 8 megs of RAM but can be expanded to either 16 or 32 MB. Nice.
It has a built-in, nearly full-size keyboard.
It has a built in modem.
On the negative side are its size – it’s larger than any of the others. The backlight also isn’t too bright.

ALTERNATIVES
There are always alternatives to using H/PCs. Some of the best are the TRGpro (what the Palm III should have been), the Newton 2100, the HP 200LX and the Psion Series 5 and 5mx. These are worth looking at if you can’t find a greyscale H/PC or simply like their alternative operating systems and available software.

I hope this helps anyone looking for a greyscale H/PC.

Rick


Edited by Richard Plume 2011-05-31 7:19 PM

Nice info Rick...but what if I'm already 100% color blind. What if I already see everything in grey scale?

LOL

Richard, thanks for the practical advice based on your experiences!

Good overview there, thanks for sharing

What a fine summary. A reference point that users will be glad to find, in the years to come. As I think I told you before, me and da family are living out of suitcases for a year, and the one H/PC I took was the Sharp Mobilon 4100. Except for the limited RAM, it's done its job.

Jake

The Sharp HC-4500 and 4600 are useless nowadays, the colour screens weren't particularly reliable and the battery pack died after three years of use. HC-4100 is the one to go for if you want a mini greyscale PC, if you can find one.

By the way, it just occurred to me that we haven't reviewed a single grayscale HPC on this site ... surely the gap would have been filled by now?

Edited by Paspie 2011-06-01 8:54 PM

I'm not sure why that is either. Perhaps because they came and went pretty quickly. I remember everyone at the time, including editors at trade publications, were looking for colour and that seemed to be the big thing. Nobody seemed to be interested in monochrome when you could have a shiny new colour unit with a battery that lasted 3-8 hours.

Of course, it could also be because no one every wrote one for HPC:Factor...

Rick

Edited by Richard Plume 2011-06-01 9:57 PM

I'm good at writing reviews and have written a lot on Epinions. I might write a review of my MP700.

Thanks for this thread by the way, I'm slightly concerned as to how long my MP700 will survive as the hinge seems fragile and still loose with the epoxy fix, maybe I didn't let it harden long enough, or does epoxy expire? It's several years old. I'll keep an eye on eBay for these models, and might want a more pocket size model eventually anyway.

I like my MP700 a lot due to the endless battery life and I can see the screen better outside than anywhere else, the exact opposite of color screens, the MP900 is all but useless outside on a sunny day other than to play mp3s.


Edited by aab 2011-06-02 12:39 AM

I was wondering, did grayscale laptops ever exist? If so I assume they didn't get the insane battery life grayscale handhelds do due to the hard drive.

How could I find a grayscale laptop on ebay? Searching "grayscale laptop" finds nothing.

The monochrome laptops I remember were mostly the 386SX era laptops (luggables). I don't recall a 486 laptop with a monochrome screen...but maybe I just never saw one.

The Velo 500 is nice in a way, but the lack of CF card etc make it cumbersome to transfer files. I do like mine though. Just not very practical these days. I have absolutely no cards or adaptors for mine.

Honestly, when it comes to greyscale, it is hard to beat my old HP 200LX (I have two of them). I run Word 5.5 for Dos on them and they work pretty seamlessly for text typing. I have had others (Compaq C140 for example) and none got the use of the 200LX. Though more and more I find myself typing away on my I-phone notepad or Office^2 and just emailing the file over to myself. I know--going over to the darkside, but it is just easy...

Hard to ever give up the Jornada, the mobilepros or my CE5 and CE6 netbooks though. They fill a niche that laptops and smart phones just don't fill for me. Sometime it is just nice to be free and not have to pack so much around.

HG

I had a 486DX with monochrome display back in the Windows 3.1 days (1993).

386SX in the pre Windows 3 days with mono display

About five years ago, I rekindled my youth. Not by finding a hooker with a heart of gold, but by buying an Epson 5.5 pound gray-scale laptop with the 486 SX processor. I'd had one of those in the early 90s, and even in the third millenium, I was able to find two new NiMH batteries. I could power all day and ran either Win 3.1/Word 6 or DOS/NewDeal Office Suite. Lots o' fun, but with a 14K modem, I never even tried to get on-line.

Jake

You forgot the Samsung Izzi Pros!