Over 30,000 IT jobs every day Mobile Technology email newsletter Get ZDNet's mobile news and reviews. The keyboard of the Mobile Pro 790 makes it a very good device for handling documents, but the comparatively high price of this PDA may steer buyers to a notebook instead. Dave Bailey reports Launched in March, NEC's Mobile Pro 790 is a light, well-specified handheld computer, and one of the few devices IT Week has seen that runs Microsoft's Handheld PC 2000 version of Windows CE.Although in performance terms its 168MHz NEC VR4121 processor is outclassed by other Windows CE units, and its price brings it near to that of a budget notebook PC, the device's keyboard means it will find favour with those who must travel light but regularly enter lots of data. The Mobile Pro 790, with dimensions of just 245x132x29mm and a weight of 0.75kg, betters cheap notebook PCs for portability.
Battery life is quoted at nine hours for typical use.
In IT Week Labs' tests using our Windows CE Processor Test 2.1, the Mobile Pro 790 returned a score of 3.57, which makes it much slower than systems such as Compaq's iPaq Pocket PC, which is based on a 206MHz Intel StrongArm processor. However, high performance is not essential for a device such as this, and we found the Mobile Pro 790 a very responsive system to use. The display is a 194x72mm LCD, 8.1in across the diagonal, with a half-VGA resolution of 640x240 in 16bit colour. Being a passive screen, the contrast is not as good as that of a TFT, especially as the backlight turns off after a few seconds of idle time. The touchscreen can be operated with fingers, but a stylus is provided that slips neatly into a slot near the screen hinge when not required.