Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Thursday, Aug 20, 1992 - Drexel University

New Palmtop Paper Issue

A new Palmtop Paper has arrived and announces several new products for the HP 95LX. One company is offering a card modem which fits in the card slot. Another has figured a method of handling a 20-megabyte flash RAM card for the card port. ACE Technologies, which previously announced their "Double Card" RAM cards which use Stacker compression software to double the effective capacity, now has software which extends the data compression to the built-in RAM disk.

In addition, ACE is now offering new AA-size Nickel Metal Hydride (rechargable) cells for the machine for $18. for a pair. These cells are rated at 1100 milliampere-hours at full charge (versus around 600 mAh for NiCds) and do not exhibit the "memory" effects that still plague virtually every Nickel Cadmium cell on the market. A not so insignificant drawback to NIMH is that it cannot tolerate as high a charging current as NiCds, so many of the "fast-charge" chargers will probably not be recommended. In the camcorder battery arena, the lack of fast charging could hurt the new cells' chances of completely replacing conventional rechargable battery packs. Alternate vendors have already been found for the NIMH AA cells for under $6.00 per cell.

The Sharp PC 3000 Palmtop

An upcoming competitor for HP95 applications is the Sharp PC-3000 palmtop. Educalc carries the unit for around $850. This is more in the Poqet PC size class with a two-hand typable keyboard, two card slots, a meg of RAM and 25 by 80 LCD. The CPU clock speed can be adjusted and tops out at 10 MHz. Paul Hubbert in the Chicago area CHIP group has obtained one and is very satisfied with the unit. It also has both serial and parallel I/O ports, allowing a fast parallel-port portable disk drive to be attached. The data transfer rates outrun the serial-port drives (such as the ones offered by Sparcom) by an order of magnitude.

London Conference Soon

The London HPCC Conference in September is fast approaching and a tentative lineup of speakers was mailed to registrants. From the U.S., there will be Jim Donnelly, Brian Walsh, Lew Thomas and Craig Finseth speaking on their own accomplishments, along with Raan Young of HP Corvallis giving the company's point of view. Richard Nelson of EduCalc will also be there to no doubt throw in his two cents on various subjects. Most of the scheduled speakers are Europeans. With the 10th anniversary of the British group along with the 20th anniversary of the HP35 calculator, there should be a good deal of hoopla at this event. There should be some interesting slides and videotape as a result.

An Alternate Index to the HP48 Manual

Ever since the end of our Philly conference in late March, I have been mentioning that I volunteered to do a revised HP48 User Manual index. Recently, I offered that index to the HPCC group to be a free handout to the attendees in London in September, so it looks like I really have to get it completed very soon. The typing is two thirds done and it is estimated to be finished within a week. Approximate size is 4000 entries, or around 30 pages long (if two columns of entries will fit side-by-side on each page). This will represent only a twofold increase in the number of entries that Hewlett-Packard included in their original index. Perhaps their job was more thorough than originally thought.