Only good in a great crowd. (HP Jornada 545)

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Product:	HP Jornada 545
Date:	14/10/00 (211 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheapest, Organise your life

Disadvantages: Poor screen, only 16MB RAM

The Jornada 545 pocket pc was one of the launch machines for the new microsoft operating system.

The Jornada has an SH3 133MHz processor and has 16MB RAM. It has good sound, and is capable of displaying 4,000 colours.

16MB RAM is not acceptable. The Jornada 548 has 32MB but costs over £80 more. Seeing as mp3 takes up a MB per min you can only have about 16 mins of music, or 4 tracks. And if you want to take advantage of other types of media that the new OS boasts then you won't have enough room, with e-books and mpeg video taking up a lot of memory. Only 32MB will do.

The Screen is only capable of 4,000 colours. This would be ok, but the Jornada screen isn't TFT (the best type of screen). Only TFT will do. Hewlett Packard quoted 65,000 colours but they made an error in some software and it is therefore only capable of 4,000. There wouldn't be much difference if the screen was TFT but it isn't and it doesn't look as good. It is still good however, but not as good as it could be!

The new microsoft operating system (pocket pc) is very good, and a vast improvement on previous versions. It is now capable of playing mp3 music as well as WMA format. It can play short movie clips and you can read e-books with microsoft reader. The new pocket office suite is great. With pocket word and excel you can view documents on the go. The OS has loads of new features.

The Jornada 545 has a type 1 compact flash expansion slot built in (unlike the ipaq) so memory can be added if necessary (which it is).

The Jornada is very elegant and nice to look at. It is the only pocket pc that has a screen cover palm style and it niftily holds the 'string-bean' stylus. It looks superb. IT has an IR (infra-red) port, a scroller for scrolling down pages and a headphone socket all mounted on the elegant case. It has 4 customisable buttons on the front, which are very useful. Also it has a useful microphone, handy for
making voice notes.

The Jornada is quite heavy compared to other machines though weighing in at a hefty 8.6 ounces.

Syncing is fast through USB which is very good for transfering large files such as mp3 files.

It has good battery life, at about 9 hours, but of course, that is a best situation statistic. The battery is rechargable lithium.

Overall the Jornada is a great pocket pc, but is flawed by a not great screen and only 16MB RAM. If you are gonna buy a Jornada but the 548 instead of the 545. Or, buy the ipaq or EM-500, which are better!

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