HP Jornada 680 Review

Good Points
Long battery life
Usable keyboard
Built in modem
NE2000 PCMCIA card compatible

Bad Points
Slow screen refresh (not TFT)
Easy to press more than one key at once
No headphone socket
Max 512MB Compact Flash Card

General Comments
The HP Jornada 680 is a nice machine, very compact. It is running Windows CE 3.01 with the standard Pocket Office applications plus HP's suite of applications.

The touch screen is not accurate if you do not press hard enough and one often feels that pressing hard could damage it, but after the massive number of games of squares I have played on it, it still looks excellent.

Although the CPU is fast enough to run my SNES and gameboy emulator as well as play MPEG videos with the free pocket DivX player, the screen certainly is not. The slow update of the screen makes the whole machine seem sluggish.

The other major problem with this machine is the lack of a headphone socket. You have to use the tiny (and pathetic) speaker built in. Not only does this make using the built in dictaphone difficult (which can record non stop for days on end, even when the machien is otherwise off). But it also makes playing games and watching videos and listening to MP3's practically impossible.

It is also fiddley to use Windows CE to organise anything.

So this machine is only really good for web browsing in your hotel room (slowly) and typing on the move. If that was what you wanted to do you might as well stick a libretto in your brief case because this thing is only half the size.