The Wyvern has landed

HP420 Jornada

Microsoft unveiled another code name from the CE line up recently. Following on from Jupiter, which was launched late last year as the HPC Pro notepad machines running CE 2.11, Wyvern is Windows CE 2.11 for palm sized PCs. This introduces colour displays to palm tops; although not for the first time, as some Sharp products have used colour in the digital diary market.

Hewlett-Packard have taken this as their cue to announce their first palm sized CE product, and other vendors have also announced models, including Everex, Casio and Philips. The HP 420 Jornada is the name for their palm sized PC, taking the risk of confusion with their 820 Jornada, a much larger HPC Pro model.

Although the HP 420 should be selling by the time this issue of PC Pro is available, I have only seen pre-production models so far. From these I think it is reasonable to assume that the machines will be a similar size to other palm sized products, although significantly heavier, and much thicker (possibly as much as twice as thick as a Casio E-11, for example). They claim that battery life may be as much as 6 to 8 hours - this is the same as was claimed for the original Newton, which was slightly too short in practice to use for a full working day away from a power socket. A true ten hours, or claimed twelve hours is really required before battery life starts to become adequate. The display is very similar to that used on the HP620LX HPC, which is both clear, bright and attractive.

This release also makes Visual Basic and MFC available for palm sized PCs, which is good news for embedded developers. Shortly after the first Wyvern models ship CE Services 2.3 is due to be released. This will solve two annoying problems: it removes the requirement for using RAS to connect to Windows NT systems, which caused many users a lot of problems with configuration, and it will now autodetect and match different serial port speeds, which will make most users connections much faster.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: August 18, 1999