HP Jornada

» see hp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the jornada was for guys in suits. in 1999 i was a teenager pulling 33.6k off a ttnet line, and the people i saw with a hp jornada in a turkish-tv business segment were managers with corporate accounts. it was not a thing teenagers bought. it was not a thing teenagers' families bought. it was a thing that came with an enterprise mobile contract for a sales force, and at the price hp was charging for the 720 (north of $900) it stayed that way.

hp launched the line in 1998 with the jornada 820, a clamshell handheld pc running windows ce 2.11 handheld pc professional edition. the 720 in 1999 became the canonical model: arm cpu and color screen, plus a real keyboard and a compact flash slot. it was a real laptop alternative for traveling middle management. you could write email on it for an entire transatlantic flight and not run the battery down.

then came the pocket pc branch (520, 540, 560 series) starting in 2000, smaller no-keyboard slabs that matched the casio cassiopeia and the compaq ipaq head-on. and at the end, in 2002, the british-only jornada 928 added a built-in gsm phone, making it one of the early pda-phones. hp merged with compaq that same year. the merged company kept the ipaq brand. the jornada line stopped.

~ the dossier ~

~ the enterprise tier ~

everything about the jornada was tuned for enterprise procurement. the 720 had a docking station with an ir port, plus a compact flash slot you could put an ethernet card into. the 568 pocket pc shipped with bluetooth in 2002. the firmware tolerated corporate exchange sync. accessories came in boxes with hp asset tags. nothing about it was teenager-coded or meant to be the cool gadget at the cafe. it was the thing in your briefcase that justified the briefcase.

that positioning is also why almost nobody outside that market talks about the jornada now. it never became a cultural object the way the palm pilot did, because it was sold the way servers and printers are sold. the people who used one used it because their employer chose it.

~ the merger that ended it ~

hp and compaq announced their merger in september 2001 and closed it in may 2002. the combined company had two competing pda lines. ipaq was the higher-volume one by then and had the developer momentum, so hp consolidated under the ipaq brand. the last jornada model, the 928 phone variant, shipped in 2002 with a uk-only launch and quietly stopped being made.

there was no formal jornada killing event. it was a brand decision in a merger room. by 2003 the ipaq h5550 was the flagship and the jornada name was off the price list.

~ what survives ~

not much, in product terms. the jornada 720 is fondly remembered on retro forums because of its keyboard quality and battery life, but it never had a developer cult comparable to the psion 5 or the sharp zaurus. its real legacy is the assertion that windows ce was a credible mobile os for business in 1999, which set up the longer arc of windows mobile and eventually the pocket pc lineage that ran until 2010.

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