Pen Computing 26 - Feb. 1999 -- Hewlett Packard is the first company to announce a color Palmsize PC, the Jornada 420. At press time, we only had preliminary information, but we felt it was important enough to include it in this issue of Pen Computing Magazine. HP plans on announcing the Jornada 420 on January 6, right before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Our magazine will be there, and if you are too, you'll likely have a chance to look at the Jornada 420 at the HP booth in person. In any case, those who expected the color version of a Palmsize PC to be large and bulky are in for a pleasant surprise. The Jornada 420 measures just 3.2 x 5.2 inches and is under an inch thick. It weighs in at eight ounces. In other words, it's about the size of a Philips Nino. That, however, is where the similarity ends for the Jornada 420Õs 320 x 240 CSTN screens presents its information in 256 glorious colors. Power for the color screen comes from a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery pack. The pack can be charged via external charger module or through an optional snap-on travel modem that also contains an RJ-11 jack. Hewlett Packard indicates six hours of continuous battery life between charges, not great, but definitely acceptable. The modem clip-on, by the way, is a 56k v.90 device and costs, including battery charger, US$159. While the color screen represents the most attractive differentiation between the Jornada 420 and first generation monochrome Palmsize PCs, HP packaged more goodies into this little marvel: The 420 also happens to be the first Palmsize PC to support FLEX paging. The unit is designed to use Motorola's CF1350 Compact Flash FLEX Pager. This allows the 420 to receive the same kind of information and numeric and alphanumeric messages that can be sent to pagers over the FLEX 900MHz paging network. Examples of such information are stock quotes, traffic reports, weather information, and more. After having used a RIM Inter@ctive Pager 950 for a few months, I can only imagine how tremendously useful a Palmsize PC with integrated paging radio could be. The opportunities seem almost unlimited. As revolutionary as the color screen and the pager capability are, in most other aspects the Jornada 420 looks quite familiar. It uses the Palmsize PC version 1.1 running on Windows CE 2.11, which means it has the same software functionality as a Nino or a Freestyle. The unit is based on a Hitachi SH3 7709a processor running at 100MHz. There is 8MB of ROM and 8MB of upgradable RAM. The 420 has the customary IR 1.2 port, speaker, microphone, ear-phone jack, and quick function and record buttons. The serial port is in the cradle. The preliminary accessories list includes, in addition to spare pens and batteries, a special "dongle" for direct charging and synchronization (US$19), a keyboard (US$79), and a "Road Warrior" pack that includes the travel modem, another Li-Ion battery, and an AC adapter (US$199). Hewlett Packard has always paid special attention to the software and application needs of its customers and equipped its products with more than just the standard Windows CE software. In this respect, the Jornada is no exception. It comes with a special backup/restore utility, a settings feature for one-key access to all important settings, the bTASK navigation tool, a business calculator, and a timed password feature. The 420 is also compliant with HP's DMI (Desktop Management Interface), making it easy to configure and manage large numbers of 420s in a corporate network. The list price of the Jornada 420 is US$499. Are we impressed? You bet. - Conrad H. Blickenstorfer