iPAQ (desktop computer)

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The iPAQ Desktop Personal Computer in its various incarnations was a desktop computer produced by the Compaq Computer Corporation around the year 2000.

The Compaq iPAQ was primarily designed to be a portable desktop computer that could be used as a simple internet capable computer.

[edit] Hardware

The iPAQ had very few limitations on upgradability; hard drives, RAM, CPU and 'Multi-Bay' drives can be readily interchanged, though the iPAQ did not contain sockets for expansion cards.

It featured an interchangeable 'Multi-Bay' slot that could accept a 3.5 inch floppy disk drives, optical drives, or a secondary hard disk device. The slot was the same as those found on many Compaq Armada and many other HP/Compaq laptop computer systems.

By a method of convection for cooling, these computers are commonly found in office environments due to their low noise (dB) output.

The iPAQ ran on either an Intel Pentium III processor or on an Intel Celeron processor; ranging from 500 MHz to 1 GHz processing speed.

It had memory ranging from 128 MB to 512 MB's user upgradable.

[edit] Internet Appliance

For a short time, around the year 2000, Compaq released a few models of an iPAQ that functioned as internet appliances. They did not have the full functionality of a computer, such as that it had no CD-ROM tray and offered very few ports to connect to for very basic use.

There were two variants of the flat-panel iPAQs, a common Windows CE based version in a white case, and the less common blue version known as the 'Clipper'.

The Windows CE version was sometimes called the 'MSN Messenger version' and worked exclusively with the Microsoft Network over a dial-up connection using the Windows CE version of Internet Explorer.

The Clipper appeared to be designed more for commercial environments and used a compact Unix-like operating system called BeIA. The built-in web browser application was a customized version of the Opera browser named "Wagner".

The Clipper also included a standard 10baseT ethernet port, and shipped with the ability for the end-user to access the command line in order to tailor the device to use a company logo on the start-up screen. It also included a Minitel client for use where Minitel was available (mainly Canada and France).