Classmates for the rest of us!

hope they do better than the HP Jornada 820: I have on my shelf, somewhere, an HP Jornada 820 that has much the same size/wight specs as the Classmates and related systems. It uses a version of WinCE (2.11) that should have worked. What it also had was the Arm CPU which could not use the available WinCE apps of the day. It also had a price tag of over $1000, but I got it for a mear $600. Later, I learned it was dropped from the HP line. It was too big for a practical PDA, which it was classed as, and lacked the apps to make it a useful laptop. I could not even pawn it when I needed a few bucks. It was a useful dial-up unit once when the power went out. The built-in modem was nice.

The Classmate class of systems are where HP wanted the J820 to be. It was a platform nearly ten years ahead of the technology. The J820 also used CF for storage but the use of WinCE and a weird CPU ended a nice try. The use of WinXP and Linux, two mainstream OSes, gives the Classmate class of systems the flexibility to be useful beyond basic Pocket Office and Pocket IE.

I keep the 820 charged up in case my main system, a 10 y/o Compaq goes to the great recycle yard in the sky. It's not Vista Ready, but Linux keeps it going for a writer.

Paul; Posted by: pfyearwood Posted on: 03/21/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use