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Leather Case, $70. Never seen one myself. Has any thought been put into this? Not that I am aware of. I imagine that you could store them pretty
tight on very short/shallow shelves, on end, in their case. But that is just a thought off the cuff. Something else that I don’t think
there has been a lot of thought put into is keeping these things charged. There is no permanent storage on a Jornada: if the
battery dies, you loose everything, including the application software. This is different from the Spyrus, which keeps the software and “database”
even if you remove the batteries. What
is worse, once the main battery dies, it starts draining the “backup”
battery, which is the little nickel battery in the compact flash compartment. When the backup dies, the unit starts popping
up an annoying message telling you the backup battery is dead. I don’t think this message can be suppressed. We could put a small compact flash card in
the bottom of the unit to provide some nonvolatile storage that would make resurrecting
the software and database without reloading possible. But that would incur the cost of the
flash card and I don’t know that this is really a win logistically though. I am pretty sure the user would still
have to go through the HP setup wizard though to calibrate the screen and set
the clock, so it would have to be an “administrator” thing, not a pollworker thing.
If you go through that hassle and have to replace the backup battery to
boot, reloading the software, which is as easy as inserting the appropriate PCMCIA
card and turning the unit on, doesn’t see like such a big deal. 32MB CF cards appear to be about $25 for what it is worth. The way AVOS (and I presume AVTS) accounts
are set up is with the units plugged into power outlets all the time, and then
turned on periodically via a central switch to charge them. I guess you’d need something
similar for the 300 PCC units. Isn’t
all this technology great? Ken -----Original Message----- Ken, has any thought been given to
the type of "travel case" these little guys should be
transported to and from and/or stored in at the warehouse? Les |