Prior to deciding on a 3G iPhone, I briefly considered the AT&T Tilt. It is a Windows Mobile Professional device, previously known as a Pocket PC cellphone (or Windows Mobile Pocket PC Edition). They are usually relatively big, but also quite powerful. The Tilt has almost the processing power of the HP iPaq 110 Classic Pocket PC. Hewlett-Packard has a long history of making Windows Mobile devices, both Pocket PCs and smartphones.

This leads me to the predecessors of the Pocket PC. Without going into the whole history of Windows PDAs, I’ll just highlight two of them.

The Handheld PC, an example of which is the HP Jornada 600 and 700 series, are Windows CE devices. They are clamshell devices with color screens and keyboards. They vary in size from about third to half the size of the Asus EeePC, and run Windows CE version 2 or 3, which looks a lot like Windows 95, with the familiar Start Menu. They even have a Windows key on the keyboard.

Prior to Windows CE, HP introduced a Palmtop computer known as the HP 200LX (see the Wikipedia article here). The HP 200LX was 100% MS-Dos compatible. It has is also a clamshell with a monochrome display and qwerty keyboard. It runs on AA batteries . The 200LX is available with 1, 2 or 4 MB of memory, and more memory can be added with Type I CompactFlash cards. Since DOS programs are small the memory is sufficient.

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by mervyn