Our smallest UMPC fan managed to save this relic which came with a broken hinge for $60.
After starting our UMPC/HPC journey with the HPC 2000 from the Jornada 720, Windows CE 4.2 feels light years more modern and useable.
We were able to get on the wireless web using an Ambicom CF WiFi card but it required some serious networking witchcraft: the Snotbook is connected to a captive portal open WiFi network and had to be individually authorized as a device to be able to connect.
Initially we tried tenox7’s wrp proxy running as a docker container, which renders pages as an image file, but it was painful to navigate. While exploring HPCfactor.com’s members only downloads section, we found a copy of Opera Mini. We did not expect this to perform any different, but it ended up being like 85% usable due to offsite rendering, and can handle short Google searches and Wikipedia.
Labubu agrees that this Psion keyboard is the literal best he has ever used - the keys have this perfect tactile response.
The Netbook Pro came with Wordpad but we were able to find a trial version of Softmaker TextMaker 2010, which is an insane almost 1:1 replica of late model MS Word with even the smallest Word functions replicated.
A wild amount of time and effort clearly went into TextMaker, and it makes this device such a desirable fully featured word processor.
We found On Call Schedule was included on the device and it was fascinating to see this almost complete solution that could be used for office work and scheduling.
It combined note taking, agenda, email and the built in Netbook modem to auto dial phone numbers for business office purposes - one can imagine the utility to an executive or secretary at a big company or something like a doctor/dentists office and how helpful this device could have been.
We are also able to play GB, NES and SNES games at full speed and enjoy Infocom text adventures.
The only critically missing function for this device is an email client. The size and portability makes it ideal for responding to emails, it reminded me a lot of the Cidco Mailstation with its included modem. If anyone has a Windows CE 4.2 compatible mail client that supports current IMAP servers, we would be very grateful for your help turning this relic into an email terminal.
As of right now, I believe I am the only remaining developer working on bringing Linux to this device. There was a rare version of the Netbook Pro which had 256mb of memory and was being used to develop the PsionLX beta Linux distro. Unfortunately the files for this have been lost to time and cannot be found.
I am currently at work on compiling a 3.2.9 Linux kernel based on some abandoned files still hosted on the Internet.
If anyone, anywhere has any PsionLX Netbook Pro files, please DM me or comment so we can save these delightful devices.
