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By Snappy!

HP Journada 720 HandheldPCSix or seven years ago, this would be totally untrue, as the HP Jornada 720 HandheldPC retailed for around US$999 back in the Fall of 1999. Today, the J720, as I call it in short, goes for below $200, averaging $140.

This is a depreciation of $859 over seven years or $122+ per year, ignoring inflation and all the economics and stuff. At this price, it became a good candidate as a poor man’s e-reader–in other words, an e-reader for me.

So how did the J720 become my e-reader?

More than e-book capabilities alone

To start off, the J720 is a HandheldPC (HPC) device. HPC is really a platform introduced by Microsoft back in the early days of PDA wars. Some say it was introduced to counter the EPOC threat while the PocketPC (PPC) was directed at Palm. The common denominator between the HPC and PPC was WindowsCE. The J720 was based on HPC 2000 which uses WindowsCE3.0 as its core. T

The HandheldPC platform defined not just the OS, but also the physical device and some additional applications like Pocket Outlook, Pocket versions of Office apps, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket PowerPoint and even Pocket Access! While these Pocket versions are crippled cousins of their desktop counterparts, nothing beats the ability to create, read or modify a Word or Excel documents in a lightweight (1.1 lbs), InstantOn device that comes with a QWERTY keyboard to boot!

Good e-book software (3rd party)

Since the J720 runs WindowsCE3.0 in its core, there is a wide variety (though limited compared to PPC devices) of 3rd party applications to run on it. To turn my J720 into a e-reader, I could just use notepad (!) to read ASCII files or a cooler app like Tombo that allows you to manage it ala the Jotter found in an EPOC handheld. To read HTML files, you can use the built-in IE for HPC (Yes, they even have that), though it uses the venerable (read: OLD!) 4.01 engine. This is still ok for short documents, but for most e-reading, HTML docs tend to be in a long file and pagination is practically absent in IE, so skip it unless you really need to.

For most of my e-reading, I use uBook from gowerpoint. This is a really nifty reader that works great on my J720. It supports:

  • Renderings of .TXT, .RTF, .HTML, .PML, .PDB and .PRC (Non-Secure), files book-like.
  • Extraction of text out of .PDF (Non-Secure) files.
  • Display of PRC, RTF and HTML images, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, .WMF (in RTF) or .BMP.
  • Opening of text inside .ZIP, .CHM and .RB files, uncompressing paragraphs on the fly, limiting the amount of memory required (except CHM).

And the best thing is the zip part! If you have a series of HTML files, you can have them compressed in a zip file, and uBook would open it up as a folder and allow you to browse it as per a folder. Neat! Great for storing even more e-books!

The other thing I like about it is the ability to customize the display fonts. It supports anti-aliased fonts so you can tweak the display all you want. For myself, I prefer Tahoma (built-in) or Verdana which I can grab from Windows on my notebook or some freefonts site and use it in uBook. Yes, without doing some nasty conversion. Neat, eh?

I won’t go into a full review of uBook here, so the last thing I’ll highlight is the ability to rotate the display in uBook. Note that this only rotates the text and menu in uBook, so the rest of the OS is still as they are. Maybe not a very useful feature for the thinner wide-screen LCD, but hey, its cool and I like it!

The one other software that resurfaced recently for me is iSilo. I used it for almost a year on my previous Palm T3 and I like it alot, but ever since uBook came along, it didn’t come along with me on my J720. Of late I dish it out again as I really needed to read some Chinese (Big5) files. uBook somehow does not support it and don’t seem to have it in the pipeline, so I got the HPC version downloaded and gave it a test run. To my surprise, it ran pretty well, in fact much faster than uBook on the same J720. I have not done any scientific tests to verify the reason, but my guess is that because iSilo compiles the raw HTML files into an indexed pdb file so it is faster in terms of opening and access links. It also preformats the html for usage according to your preferences during compile time, so I think that adds up. uBook on the other hand do everything on the fly, including drilling into a zip file, which iSilo do not support.

Weak display

So much for the e-reader software there. The J720 comes with an outdated DSTN screen (what was HP thinking?), though it is generous on its size (6.5″ compared to a paltry average of 3.5″~4.0″ in PPC), so you have a good size screen estate to read around, and enlarge your font size, compared to squinting your eyes on a PPC. The screen is a HVGA (640×240) so the default mode to me is good for eReading already. The downside is that it is transmissive DSTN, it means you want to hide away from the sun. I had my reservations about it initially, but over time, I realized that when there is so much sun out there, I probably want to go for a hike, or a swim for some, instead of reading. This is quite the opposite for E Ink devices where it is like paper and you can read with ambient light. With the J720, there is glare if you dare to bring it outdoors, but for its price, I can do with using it indoors only.

Strong battery

Its battery life is around 8+hrs brand new, but new (old stock) batteries may have varying mileage. Nothing compared to eink displays that iLiad and Sony Reader touts, or the ones from Jinke, but still very impressive when you consider that on average, I only need to recharge my J720 every 3 days or so with normal scattered usage of 2+ hrs per day. Compare that to the last PDA you have (not withstanding an old Palm), and its a winner in the battery department.

Annotations

Did I mention it comes with a QWERTY keyboard? A bit smaller than a notebook’s keyboard, but it is better than thumbing on a smartphone. However, I do find that I need a table to type with two hands … have not master the art of levitation of HPCs yet! You can try typing with one hand while holding it in the other, but trust me, its awkward. To me, that enables me to annotate the ebook when I need to. So it’s a plus point for me instead of a scribble-on-the-screen-solution. You can also get Calligrapher for it, and during my usage in the past, its pretty good actually, but I still prefer the qwerty keys unless I have no choice.

A good fit for a poor man who likes a multi-format approach

All in all, I find the J720 fitting my needs as an e-reader device fairly well. Sure, it does not have latest technology or power-efficient E Ink display, but as a poor man’s e-reader, it is a good fit, especially if you need a device that supports various formats.

HPCFactor.com has a review on the J720 here while Geeks.com have it here here if you are interested in getting to know the device better. Right now, you can get one below $200 at eBay easily.

Time for me to get back to some more reading…

 
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