Thanks for the clarification, Rog. The differences are simple. On the surface, the bigger handheld PCs–or HPCs–on the market, like Hewlett-Packard’s Jornada 820, Vadem’s Clio C-1000 and NEC’s MobilePro 800, mimic the design of laptops. They have a clamshell exterior, a largish color LCD touch screen and a small integrated keyboard. But on the inside, besides having a modem, they lack two key components: a hard drive and full-scale Windows. Without these two things, these devices can’t run anything but scaled-down–or “pocket”–versions of popular software like Microsoft Word and Excel. This means, in the case of Word documents, for example, you can take notes, but once you get back to the office you’ll have to “convert” these mini-files into the real Word format in order to use even basic features like word count and tables.
To be fair, nobody calls the HPC a laptop. It claims primarily to be a portable e-mail device and can offer five times the battery life of an ultralight. Still, analysts are grousing. “It was touted as an e-mail client [but] I have yet to get it to work on mine, and my entire job is about making that happen,” says one. “Frankly,” says another, “you have to be your own little IT department.” Most folks are busy enough.
