2 & 4 year road report
Written: Mar 09 '03 (Updated Aug 15 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Solid product, good balance of functionality/SW/performance
Cons: Price
The Bottom Line: Excellent productivity tool & entertainment unit
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| mrcycling's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Jornada 548 Pocket PC |
;-) Please see "4 year" updates at end, thank you!!!
I have owned the HP Jornada for 2 years, following is a “beat the heck out of it” abuse road report for this unit:
I am a software project manager and spend my life jumping in & out of meetings, managing large groups of individuals and being bombarded with emails at the rate of 130 mails/day. I also travel between different countries & cities by train & plane nearly weekly.
I primarily use the Jornada as an agenda, MP3 player & for reading docs (Acrobat, Word, PowerPoint etc.). I have long hesitated to write yet ANOTHER epinion on the Jornada as there are already so many, however I tend to feel that my personal experience with it is a little different from the other epinions I have read. One of my most typical uses of the Jornada will be sitting on the passenger train for a 2 hour trip to the office, where the Jornada is sitting pretty in the cradle of the Targus foldable keyboard, power cord plugged in to the power outlet beneath my seat, I am typing emails while listening to my music…I love this thing!
A funny anecdote on my life with the Jornada; although I have used the Jornada for 2 years, I have in fact owned 2 in that time span. I travel by train frequently, and business class wagons offer power outlets to the passengers. On one particularly groggy morning, about 6am, as I am getting setup for my weekly “commute” out of town and into the office and I inadvertently inserted the power charge cord into the synchronization slot and I fried the motherboard…literally, smoke came out of the Jornada’s speaker! So, since I had killed my favorite toy, I went on eBay and bought a replacement one, the same one really. Yes, one of the more proud moments in my life ;-)
Here is my experience to date broken down into 8 sections!!
1. ;-) Installation time (from the box to functioning)
2. ;-) Initial "how do you..." time
3. ;-) Adaptation period (on going)
4. ;-) Ease of deployment
5. ;-) Portability
6. ;-) Durability & Care
7. ;-) Loving
8. ;-( Not-loving
Here it goes:
1. Installation time (from the box to functioning):
•Initial boot up takes a minute or so
•Basic software (SW) installed on the unit satisfies my immediate needs
2. Initial "how do you..." time:
•It initially took me 30 seconds to find out to set the alarm clocks, then, 10 minutes later when I wanted to change it again it probably took me all of 30 minutes to find it again! Some basic functions like this one in particular are a little quirky in finding.
•Everything else is fairly intuitive if you are accustomed to poking around your PC’s desktop, with the so familiar icons for Word, Excel etc.
3. Adaptation period (on going)
•As an agenda: I had previously been working with the Palm 100 something series, I was one of the earlier 1 million adopters who fell in love with carrying around a small piece of plastic, and growing into this full colored agenda was very easy. If you love working with the Outlook agenda, the Outlook Lite agenda on the Jornada will charm you. Using Outlook Lite becomes a true office away from the office integrating email with address book etc.
•As an MP3 player: As a traveling professional who depends on music in a very big way to save his sanity, I used to carry around a CD case the size of my notebook computer, literally carrying around thousands of dollars worth of CD’s and taking away from my home some of the CD’s my wife loves; I would call her from “Wahoo Nebraska” (literally) and she would …not yell, but rather loudly be unhappy that I would take all of her CD’s with me on the road to business trips. Now, I have converted all of my CD’s into MP3’s, and with the beautifully wonderful 128 MB memory card I received last year for X-Mas, I can store nearly 2 CD’s worth of music for each road trip. The sound is digital my man, therefore, all you need to do is plug in some DJ style headphones and you got yourself a pocket symphony. I would say that the ability to kick up Outlook and play music at once is probably the 2 things I love the most about this unit.
•As an eBook/PDF/.DOC reader: Ok, the screen is a bit small, but for the convenience of the small size of the entire unit, it really is way too cool to be able to load up all these different file formats, and while I would not recommend attempting to read “War and Peace” on it, I have read a few short novels and tons of PDF’s and feel that this is not a bad experience.
•As a gaming center: Since the train & the plane can get boring sometimes, I have installed several small games, the likes of the "balls/lines” and pinball etc. and find this to be a great stress reliever.
4.Ease of deployment:
•As stated above, I use the Jornada in combination with the Targus foldable keyboard…this is the most gain in efficiency I have ever made by adopting these tow thingies (and I have diligently reported on the Targus keyboard, please visit my epinion for more details : http://www.epinions.com/content_84903104132). Imagine only needing 5 seconds to kick up a computer, software and keyboard (on the plane, train or in a meeting) to type up notes so that you can later do electronic searches etc.? Well, the Jornada gives you this power, adopt it, embrace it, use it, and become that much more efficient that your colleagues will be jealous. Trust me, they will be.
5. Portability:
•I still use a notebook computer, however, as it is NT based, it takes forever to boot and requires that much more space to open up
•I store the Jornada in my left pocket, the Targus keyboard in the other, and walk into meetings looking totally unprepared. I empty out my pockets, plug them together and GO!!!!!!!!
6. Durability & Care:
•Care: I try to be very diligent since I know the screens are relatively fragile. I use the expensive screen protectors and clean it often.
•Durability of buttons: All buttons still work very well, no problems with them.
•Durability of the casing: The paint of the front panel is all scorched up from the many battles I have taken the Jornada to, however it still functions. I have dropped the unit SEVERAL times and it still works very well.
7. Loving:
•The versatility: portable office (MS suite, Acrobat etc.) & home (music, games, eBooks), and essentially the ability to do all these at the same time.
•The portability
•The ease of deployment
•The look! I believe that this unit looks good; it has a very subdued style, and does not flash as much as the Compaq’s, and I like that.
•The durability
•The upgradability: whether be installing new SW or adding peripherals, this is a “grow with the new toys” technology.
8. Not-loving:
•The cost: the price of the unit is still fairly prohibitive for many people
•A little sluggish, but I just keep reminding myself of the performance of my first computer (Commodore Vic 20)
•The screen is hard to read in full sun light
•The battery autonomy is low, so I always carry around my power cord and now have the “cigarette lighter” adaptor which works with the USB connector to power up in the car.
2 very good friends of mine have the same PDA, and although they have not exploited it as much as I have with regards to its full functional capacity, they still seem to enjoy it quite a bit. After 2 years of solid abuse, I feel that the only reason I will eventually change to another PDA will be because I will need some kind of SW for work which is not compatible, otherwise, I could seem myself working with this much CPU & memory for quite a while yet! Cheers.
Update August 15, 2005:
Hey dude! Ok, I now have had the unit for 4 years, and I am still very satisfied with it…is that possible?? A PDA lasting that long? Yup;-)
• Biggest problem to date, the battery died; I could not recharge it any more, but I did for 4 years thousands of times. I found a supplied on eBay, bought it for 10$ plus S/H. I replaced it myself (even though HP says you need to be a rocket-scientist-engineer, which I ain’t); the operation took about 5 minutes (because I did not have a good screwdriver), otherwise it will take you about 2 minutes. Simply remove the 4 TINY screws, click off the old battery, click in the new one, screw back in the 4 TINY screws and voila!
• Other than that, casing still looks good, screen is in good shape, buttons all work well, and besides the weight (it is heavy) I plan on using this thing for a while yet!! I am a Management Consultant and work in many different companies, and everywhere I go I simply load Win CE & sync with Outlook in a manner of seconds.
So, all that to say, congratulations to HP (which I do not work for, since I ain’t a rocket-scientist-engineer) for making a heck of a solid product, I have dropped this thing so many times onto cement, asphalt etc. and it still works!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 400
Recommended for: Beginners - Simple and Easy to Use
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Epinions.com ID:
mrcycling
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Member: Frederick Helmut Stoltz
Location: Canada
Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Project Manager/Management Consultant, pmp/PMI, cycling nut (mountain & road), dog lover
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