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Jor-not-a Pocket PC?
Bool writes: "HP was wrong when they claimed that the Jornada 540 series has a 16-bit color display. It was Jason Cluts who pointed out that the supposed 16-bit display was actually a 12-bit display. HP has issued an erratum on the subject that you can read here. You can find more details at this Web site." Apparently, the USB is slower than it should be, too. Has anyone else played with one of these things?
tcd004
Here are my Microsoft and AICN parodies, where are yours?
I'm Jason Cluts, the one who supposedly pointed out to HP that the display is only 12-bit.
I just wanted to note here that I wasn't necessarily the one who pointed out to them the Jornada was only 12-bit. I think we can all assume that HP knew this well before I brought it to their attention. All I did was rant on a public message board about how the display was obviously not 16-bit.
According to someone I spoke with at HP, it was only after reading these comments that they looked into the matter and discovered the Jornada was only 12-bit. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that's what I was told. Personally, I think they realized they weren't going to get away with marketing it as 16-bit after reading my comments.
Of course, that's probably just a small part of the whole story. If nothing else, the story I was told by them was just a convenient way to own up to a rather embarrassing situation. Maybe we'll get some further insight into the whole matter when HP makes their official statement tomorrow. I somehow doubt it though.
I still have the Jornada but I'm relatively sure that I'll swapping it in for a Palm in the coming weeks. HP will have to come up with something really good to keep me from dumping the thing.
... before you go spewing off rhetoric about what you think you know.
MS are banning *all* software sales on EBay, regardless of whether it's a prepackaged, fully licensed, valid version, or not.
Idiot.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Hey man, normally I would agree with you. I mean who really cares about a 4 bit color difference in a product that most of us don't (and will never) own? But hey, Its Sunday night and not much else is happening in the world (Hopefully most everyone here is talking about the good X-Files Ep tonite, but I digress). I'm just glad to have something to read before I go to bed.
There'll be better stories tomorrow, I promise.
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
The Newton isn't the only promissing thing they've orphaned.
What was the name of that ruggedized mini-laptop that Apple released? It had a weird contoured screen and was smaller than a laptop but larger than a Win-CE device. Supposedly, it was aimed for sale to schools. I saw a kid with one on a bus and thought it was the coolest looking thing.
Anyway, I guess my point is that Apple is famous for innovations they let wither and die.
I've had the displeasure of working with the earlier Jornadas in both the handheld and palm varities. They are nothing but a large headache. Conversely, I've found both the Palm III, and especially the Palm VII to be handy, useful, and fun. The problems with the Jornadas are multifold. First of all, Windows CE 2.0 is an embedded disaster. The only functionality it provides which is slightly cool is the sound recording interface built in to the Jornadas. Along with this feature though comes a physical footprint that is unwieldy. Add to that the ridiculous fold down plastic lid and you have something that would only fit in the pocket of the baggiest beach shorts you own. It remains to be seen whether or not color is useful in a PDA. When more of them use quality bitmap images, perhaps this will prove to be a necesity. Until then, using color isn't terribly useful. For the additional cost, there isn't enough value added for my money. Skip the cost and buy a Palm VII which has cool remote Internet capabilities. HP and Sony (Casiopeia) need to rethink their PDA strategy. Microsoft hasn't proven to be an automatic win in this arena, and doesn't look good anytime soon. The "Windows powered" stuff looks promising... but then so did CE before I started working and programming in it.
--- One world, one chance Doc.
Seriously that's not a bad idea as long as you had your ducks in a row first. Things like insuring licensing was under GPL and the product, if hardware had full *nix support.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I recently bought a Casio E-105 PDA for $599 (the standard running price at the time), on the box and in the documentation it says clearly that its "upgradeable". I was previously a Palm III user, and was intensely dissatisfied with the display and resolution, and the relative lack of cpu power in the Palms. I started coding for CE stuff, the interface was horrid and bloated, although powerful. It was clearly a desktop computer to pda hack. Casio promised speed, power and easy synching. What speed? the thing is slow as molasses in a freezer, granted, it has power, you can do a lot with them, easy synching? nothing could be farther from the truth, the synching process (AS3.0) was completely unreliable, and most of the time didn't work properly. No matter, I could bear with it til the next CE upgrade... About a month after I bought my Casio, the PocketPCs came out, and along with that came Casio's announcement that they were not going to offer upgrades for the Casio e-10x series. Needless to say (and i hope this doesn't get moderated down), I was severely fucking pissed off, and out of desperation to reclaim as much of my hard earned cash i could, i decided to sell it on Ebay, but now looking on Ebay the going rate for the E105s has dropped drastically. I am now the happy owner of a nice new shiny Palm IIIc, I now remember why I so clung to my pda, as a reliable store of information, a friendly reminder of appointments, etc. Thanks Palm, and you can count me as a buyer when those StrongArm palms come out. To Casio: fuck you! what you've done to your customers is virtually fraud. hope you and your company rot in hell for duping so many folks out of quite a sum of cash. To the DOJ: rumour has it, you're looking at going after Palm next, for anti-trust. I have to ask: Why? Becuase they offer quality products that do what they say? pshaw! Palm Ubers Alles! Signed, Your Happy Born Again Palm Owner, jakob@absent.org PS: I have a nice Casio E-105 for sale, including a Rhinoskin 2000 case, and an MS Press book on CE 2.11 coding, e-mail me at the above address and make me an offer.
Unless the iPaq is a designation for an entire line of computers. The iPaq is a cheap iMac ripoff that sucks. I'm sitting on one right now. It's nice and small, but the CD-ROM drive is NOT a standard option. (Yes, that's right, NO removable media at all!), and it only has Ethernet, no modem.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
DO you have hte same model of Jornada?
I have a 680 (With a keyboard and 640x240 screen) for which you could download a 16-bit (64K) color driver, though it was originally only 256 colors. The change was very obvious, though I don't have any real good way to ascertain it IS actually 64K colors, but since it wasn't listed in the errata, it may just be this particular model (548) that isn't actually 16-bit.
Of course, if that IS your model, you might be right...
Table lookup display drivers give you a lot more choices (the 12 or 16 bits can be a lot of gray levels plus a reasonable number of colors, and even 8 bits is a good start as long as you don't mind the non-active windows being all the wrong colors because somebody else has the color table right now.
There are also several different Jornadas - one's Palm-shaped, one's large-Psion-shaped.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If HP refunds the four bits, does that mean they owe their customers fifty cents each?
I've been told that Slashdot will only post so many stories during one day -- that means we lost a potentially interesting story for this one: a stupid nitpick about a product that is continually made fun of on /. anyway. What gives?
Rusty's experiment with Kuro5hin seems to be working out alright - why doesn't Malda swallow his pride and learn from somebody else how to implement story moderation... Slashdot is going down the tubes.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Although I'm sure they've fixed this by now, I actually bought a Psion Sienna a few years back to replace my original Pilot 1000.
I kept it for an entire week, sure that somehow, somewhere, there must be some way to make the thing create an @-sign for storing e-mail addresses. I called Psion's support line and the best they could do was, "gee, we're not sure..." I finally learned through back channels to Psion that the Sienna was intentionally incapable of storing e-mail addresses because they didn't want it to compete with the more expensive Psions which were supposedly aimed at a more tech-savvy market. Any company with an attitude like that deserves to fail.
I returned the Sienna and bought the then-new PalmPilot Pro I still carry. (Although I'm itching for a new one now.) EPOC32 isn't too bad, but the Psion devices are too expensive to justify the marginal increase in capability, and they don't enjoy the broad software support the Palms have. There's no question I'd hang onto the PPP 'til the end if someone were to begin stripping me of my computers one by one.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The argument here always seems to be between the WinCEs and the Palms yet the best palmtops/PDAs I have come across are the Psion machines running the EPOC operating system.
Have a look at the Psion web site.
http://www.psion.com/
The Psion palmtops really do put the WinCE competition to shame. From the tiny Revo to the Netbook, the machines are *designed* to do a job, they don't just have random feature X bolted on because the marketing department say they must have it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You're conflating two completely seperate things here. First, you praise NT's uptimes, with allowances for applications that occasionally die. In the very next sentence, you criticize Netscape's stability under Linux. That's like me saying, "Linux is rock solid. Oh, sure, occasionally I need to kill -9 Netscape every once in a while, but it never takes down the OS. How often does IE hang on NT?"
I don't doubt that "with good hardware and drivers, [NT] can be as stable as linux," but those hardware requirements are pretty discouraging when you're on a budget. And if you're not on a budget, you don't really need to use either.
I'd hate to say it, but I suspect that Yu Suzuki just had his post moderated up, even though it's probably completely false. He's probably laughing very hard right now.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
So, false advertising, eh? Will the FTC handle slapping HP a penalty or will a class action lawsuit be necessary?
If you look here it appears that 12-bit color is not that much worse than 16-bit. Still, 65,536 colors does beat 4,096 colors. I wonder how much difference it makes on a small handheld screen anyway?
The spec page now says it's a "240 x 320 pixels LCD rich color display".
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
To all of you MS naysayers (i.e. 95% of anyone who posts to Slashdot), I suggest that you don't be so quick to slam CE or PocketPC devices simply b/c it being a product powered by a Microsoft OS. WinCE 1.xx had some serious problems, and Microsoft has learned from these problems and has made what I feel is the most stable OS in their product line. Granted, you need a good bit more fault tolerance for an embedded OS, but it's a good combination of ergonomics and actual function. And as for battery power, Casio has recently announced the development of a rechageable battery that will last for 76 hours on their E-11x and E-5xx lines of PDAs. I'm not stating that one OS/platform/etc. in the PDA market is greater than the other. I do think, however, that many of you will be surprised by what PocketPC devices are offering. Here is a good place to start: http://www.wincecity.com - crisis