Awkward new offering for people on move flunks keyboard test

Let's get something straight to begin with: I love gadgets. However, Hewlett-Packard's new Jornada 820 Handheld PC is no mere big boy's toy.

Stuck somewhere between a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a sub-notebook, the Jornada is obviously meant to fulfil a certain need for people who need to work on the move, but don't like carrying heavy notebooks and want more functionality that a PDA can provide.

Unfortunately, by combining these two product lines, HP seems to have kept the worst of both.

Although the Jornada has a full-sized 101-key keyboard, it is the most awkward and unresponsive I have ever used. I did manage to write several long pieces on the Jornada, but ended up spending half the time going back to fill in missing letters. That was a task in itself, given the equally unresponsive nature of the touchpad.

What I would really love to know is: who had the bright idea of incorporating the on/off switch into the keyboard, instead of putting it somewhere separate and out of the way, as is the case with most notebooks? To make matters even worse, it is located where the delete key normally is.

The Jornada, like most PDAs, stores data in memory rather than on a hard drive, so turning off the machine does not cause unsaved data to be lost.

Its instant-on StrongArm 190 MHz processor helps it to boot up very fast, so switching the machine off and on again is simple.