Jon's Gadget: HP Pocket PC 4400

The Hewlett Packard Pocket PC is a somewhat stylish, somewhat bulky, and, in this particular case, somewhat scuffed rung on the ladder which leads to ever smaller and more functional computing devices. As ridiculous as it sounds I bought this the summer after my graduation with the specific intent of bringing it to France with me, where I hoped to use it to experiment with the ideas in
Soft Computing: Integrating Evolutionary, Neural, and Fuzzy Systems, a book which I will review later.

The pre-installed Windows CE operating system, while sufficient for most pocket organizer type tasks, had some severe and irritating limitations, such as the absence of any such concepts as a working directory or even a command line interface. Retrospectively, this makes a certain amount of sense, given that text entry with the device is slow and tedious no matter whether the user chooses to use the built in handwriting recognition system or a very tiny on screen keyboard. Nevertheless, a good deal of software was available, even for the Programmer on the go, including a stripped down version of Python and a fairly complete Scheme implementation with enough graphing facilities to enable some experimental computing.

These days I have installed, with some trepidation, a Linux distribution (Familiar) on it, and having finally made good on its promise to be a fully fledged, portable computer (it even has a C compiler), I have proceeded to use it strictly as a very expensive, highly customizable, wireless internet ready alarm clock.

Score: 6/10

Shall I Keep It?: Yes. I have wondered if I can't get Apache running on it and host a small web page. Plus, I am holding out for the next Familiar.

Jon_, JonGadget_