HP620LX and Windows CE 2.0

Recently I have been living with the Hewlett-Packard HP620LX, which is a colour machine with 16 megabytes of RAM and a 3 hour battery life. I came across it one day in Fry's, and had to take it home with me. I was actually looking for the new Toshiba Libretto 70CT, which has just been released, but it wasn't available anywhere on the West Coast over the New Year. I also turned up a new version of the Casio Cassiopeia, the A20, also with CE 2.0, which I didn't get a chance to try out, but looks much better than the old A10 and A11 models.

Pretty but hunky?

Frankly, the HP620LX is gorgeous. The case is a delicate graphite black, a colour that most manufacturers fall just shy of producing. The colour display has great impact, and really conveys the feel of the Windows CE user interface much more pleasantly than grey-scale. The icons used for the button bar below the screen are attractive versions of the built in application icons. Hewlett-Packard have solved the power supply problems with HPCs by giving it a lithium ion battery, which means that it can drive even my power crazy PC Card modem (I use a Creative Labs Modem Blaster for tests, because of the amazing way that it can suck all the life out of any pair of AA cell batteries in seconds) for several minutes at a time. I can even make half a dozen connections for mail during a working day, and have enough power to read and reply to a batch of messages - today's email collection stands at about 40 messages.

The HP620LX isn't an unqualified success, despite all the good things I have to say about it. The keyboard is another of those button affairs over a plastic membrane, which is fine for two fingers (or two thumbs), but brings on instant wrist ache if you try for touch typing. Battery life is about three hours, which means you are a slave to a power socket if you want to use for any length of time: to write this column, for instance, I am partly using a PalmPilot, partly a desktop machine (a NeXT cube), and partly, and quite painfully, this HP620LX - but attached firmly to a wall socket. One of the most amazing features, and one that I have been amusing myself with, is the eject button for the stylus. Pressing the silvery button results in the stylus shooting out with some force; if there wasn't a retaining mechanism, I'd have lost a dozen styluses by now. I've been handing the machine to various people and asking them to draw something on the screen with the stylus: most can find the hole where the end of the stylus protrudes, but few people so far have worked out that it requires you to use the eject button.

One problem I found was so bad, and so ridiculously easy to avoid, that I actually laughed out loud when I noticed it. Hewlett-Packard give you a desk stand with the HP620LX; it is a small assembly of plastic mouldings, with sockets for the power cord and serial cable, and a holder for the stylus. However, the plate that the HP rests on and the base plate that stands on your desk are separate, and can't be firmly attached. As a consequence, attempting to type on the keyboard causes it to bounce around so much that you have to pause between words in case it works up so much resonance that it bounces into the air and off the stand. Rocking when used on a desktop was an annoyance that all of the first generation of Windows CE systems suffered from: my amusement was because the HP620LX is rock steady on a desk when used without the desk stand. Take my advice and send it the round file immediately.

The one aspect that makes the HP620LX less than ideal is its incredible bulk. I don't have the exact figures (there should be a review in an earlier PC Pro with the details), but it is the same size as a Newton MP2100, and about the same weight. The Toshiba Libretto is only slightly bigger, and has a comparable battery life.

The forgotten feature in Windows CE 2.0 that most incenses me is that, once again, it is the only PDA environment that doesn't have a scripting mechanism for Internet connections. It beggars belief that Microsoft have, for the second time, passed over this important and convenient feature. I use Compuserve for Internet access when travelling, and they require you to script connection via PPP thought their access nodes. This means that I have to type /GO:PPPCONNECT as well as my user number and password every single time.

I am also uncomfortable with the way that Inbox treats POP mailboxes. It has its good points: processing a POP mail box is relatively fast, and it is smart enough to skip previously read messages. However, it insists on making and breaking your Internet connection whenever you open and close the mail box, and also keeps the connection to both the POP and the SMTP servers open all the time that you are connected. I don't appreciate having to pay for multiple phone calls to process one set of new mail messages, and I equally dislike the alternative option of waiting for messages to be sent and processed as I make requests while connected. There is a away around this: start the Internet connection from Remote Networking rather than from the connection icon in Inbox, and Inbox will leave it open when you close. I would much rather Inbox downloaded the POP messages into the Inbox (yes, it is confusing: the application has the same name as one of the mail folders). Most other email applications work this way, and it feels far more natural to do so. That way the Inbox really would be an in box; as it stands, the Inbox is really a representation of my remote mailbox on a server machine, but without the cues required to suggest that you treat it as a distant mailbox on a slow connection.

It is already clear that, in the real world, I am going to get on far better with Windows CE 2.0 than with the abhorrent CE 1.0. Only time will tell.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: March 11, 1998