Hewlett Packard Jornada 548 Color Pocket PC

[Archived in $200 - $300, HP Handhelds und PDAs, Handhelds, Hewlett Packard, Products]

Manufacturer: Hewlett Packard
Price at amazon.com: $283.84
This item is not stocked or has been discontinued.

Product Features:

• Sharp 12-bit color LCD screen, 4,096 colors
• Includes MP3 player for listening to digital music, audiobooks, and news
• Check e-mail and surf the Web
• Manage your schedule with Pocket Outlook and your finances with Pocket Money
• What's in the box: Jornada 548, Stylus, AC adapter, Jornada CD-ROM, HP documentation pack, Microsoft ActiveSync CD-ROM, USB cradle

Product Description:

If you are looking for a high-powered Pocket PC that contains everything you need to organize your life and entertain you in your free time, the HP Jornada 548 Color Pocket PC is the machine to have. You can check your e-mail, review Word and Excel documents, surf the Web, read electronic books, and listen to digital music. It's slim enough to fit in your pocket or carry in your hand. The HP Jornada 548 also comes with many software titles from Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and more. The HP... read more


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Description from Manufacturer: Windows PDAs have long fought an uphill battle. Users have flocked to the highly functional Palm Connected Organizers and tended to ignore the more powerful, more expensive, and bigger Windows PDAs. The release of the new HP Jornada 548, the first among the new Pocket PC devices to hit the market, may finally turn this around. The Jornada is still a bit bigger, about 5 ounces heavier, and more expensive than the Palm Vx. But it is sleek, robust, highly functional, and the color screen is beautifully sharp. The "wow" factor is definitely there.

The Pocket PC OS is also responsive and well thought out--a big improvement over WinCE. In addition to the suite of powerful pocket applications (Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, PIM, and Scheduler), the Jornada can also serve as a digital voice recorder (to capture those spur-of-the-moment thoughts), an MP3 player, audible content player, and even an e-books reader.

The standard 32 MB memory is expandable using standard CompactFlash Type I cards. The product ships with a synchronization cradle (which supports USB or conventional serial interfaces), an extra sync cable (so you don't have to take the cradle everywhere), an AC power adapter, and earbuds. A microphone and a small speaker are built in. For MP3 use, we recommend expanding your RAM to 64 MB with a CompactFlash card to provide an hour of near-CD-quality music.

Most Windows users should be able to run through the setup wizard and start using the Jornada and its applications without cracking the manual. Learning to use handwriting recognition, which is integrated into all the applications, requires mastering a few special stylus strokes, but you should be writing smoothly within half an hour. In comparison with Palm's Graffiti system, the Pocket PC system is fully on par.

In our tests, setting up a connection to a desktop PC for synchronization was simple. Within 20 minutes, we had installed the ActiveSync software, hooked up the supplied cradle to the AC adapter and a USB port on our PC, and established a connection. If you have an older PC or laptop, you can also synchronize using a slower serial connection. Synchronization is automatic and file transfer is simple using the Windows Explorer-like interface.

The only real caveat is that Pocket PC works best in a Windows-centric world. At launch, it appears that there is no support for synchronizing with non-Microsoft e-mail and scheduling applications. (With an optional modem or network-interface card, you can send and receive Internet POP mail directly via your ISP.)

The choice between Pocket PC and Palm still comes down to tradeoffs. Palms are still lighter, smaller, and cheaper, and they do the basics beautifully. The Jornada 548 is slightly bigger, 5 ounces heavier, more expensive, but vastly more powerful and flexible. The choice all depends on what you expect your PDA to do. --Thomas Mace

Pros:

• Handsome, compact design
• Superb color screen
• Ships with 32 MB RAM
• Large application suite
• Easy setup and intuitive interface

Cons:

• No support for synchronization of non-Microsoft e-mail and scheduling applications
• 5 ounces heavier than Palm V

Average Customer Rating:

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Comment: Could be a lot better for the price. Rating:
I bought the Jornada 548 and returned it within 30 days because it just didn't have the functionality it implies it has. For one, I am a heavy Outlook user and in order to synchronize subfolders or personal folders from my desktop the only solution was another [...] third party software package.....which by the way offers the same solution for my Palm III. This was the primary feature I was looking for and told the HP had. The tech support wasn't much help either. I both emailed and called to find a solution to the sychronization problem. The call in support said the feature was there, but I needed a patch from Microsoft. The email support didn't answer for 10 days. Upon checking with Microsoft, they said the feature doesn't exist with Active Sync, but referred me to the third party package Intellisync.

Bottom line is I returned the Jornada, bought Intellisync for my Palm III and can now syncronize subfolders and personal folders.

If you like the color display and layout (Microsoft vs Palm OS) which I admit is very nice, friendly, and easy to use, then spend the [money]. This platform has quite a bit of maturing to do before I will lay out that kind of cash.

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Comment: Quick shipment, but now there is a problem w/no response. Rating:
The product was shipped quickly. But now I cannot get the Pocket PC to connect to any PC. I have emailed the seller numerous times about this and they will not respond to me. Amazon is abolutely no help either, they will not do anything to help me. If I ever do get the problem fixed, I will change the bad rating for the seller.

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Comment: HP Jornada 547/548 Rating:
Great PDA, beats out any palm type device by a longshot in capability expandability. Only draw back is ever shrinking selection of aftermarket goodies for it due to the processor.

Posted at November 11, 2003 07:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)