I was watching Terminator 2 the other day and noticed the character John Connor using a small piece of Atari hardware to work out the pin no. for a stolen credit card and steal cash.
It looked interesting so I went to the Atari museum website and found out it was their palmtop computer the Portfolio (1989), quite a neat little device for its day. Apparently running an 8088 chip at 4mhz.;D
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/pccomputers/portfolio.html
Nifty looking device. I greatly lament the demise of the "Palmtop" computer (clamshell-with-a-keyboard form factor).
I agree with you. I have an old cassiopia a11 (upgraded to wince 2.0) that is rather clunky but it was cool with the keyboard.
My favorite though is my HP Jornda 820. Its a wince 2.11 device that has a 9 inch 640x480 vga color screen, a nice little touch typable keyboard, a pcmcia and cf slot and a usb port. I love that lihttle thingy. I put a wireless card into it and installed terminal services client and now i can access my desktop computers and use them though the jornada while sitting on the can or whereever.
I'm trying to see if i can get my boss's 820 as well. he never uses it anymore.
My favorite is HP-200LX. It is dos compatible clamshell palmtop, it is small and cool. Has i80186 CPU on almost 8Mhz and 2Mb RAM, uses 640k for system needs - the rest is ram disk. 640x200 CGA LCD with 4 shades. Has on PCMCIA card slot and run on 2 AA cells. The only bad thing about it is that it doesn't have backlight (just as Atari Portfolio) , but I've seen projects on the Internet for adding it on such a palmtops.
I've been a big Psion fan- they were a lot like Apple in that they had superior design and a superior operating system but had overpriced hardware. Thus while they had some success in Europe when they tried to crack the U.S. market (with no competent marketing whatsoever) they got killed. I looked at Jornadas, but the 680-720s are clunkier than a Psion's 5mx and I could never bring myself to buy into a mini-version of a bad OS. The EPOC (which morphed into Symbian) operating system was simply the best handheld OS ever, and it's fans are still going strong and hanging on to their 5 year old technology with Newton-like fervor. I'm posting this from a netbook (Psion's sub-notebook).
I think the palmtop clamshell died partly because a lot of people didn't understand their niche and understand the tradeoffs involved. Reviewer after reviewer don't get those devices. They always complain that the device is too clunky if it has a decent size screen and keyboard. If they make the device smaller to address those concerns, then they complain that the screen is too small and the small keys too fiddly. I for one would like to get a 9500 communicator- but I think it's too small, and they made it that way because people made fun of how clunky the previous models were. Good grief.