I've used a NEC MobilePro 900C for a long time during my apprenticeship. It got used as a daily note-taking device.
As I really like the form factor of this device I thought a long time about swapping the internals to a more modern hardware.
The original hardware is, compared to modern hardware, somewhat rusty:
| NEC MobilePro 900 | !NEC MPi 400 | |
| Operating System | WinCE.net 4.20 | Linux |
| CPU | Intel XScale PXA255 Singlecore ARMv5TE 1* 400MHz 32Bit | Broadcom BCM2711C0 (Raspberry PI CM4) Quadcore Cortex-A72 (ARMv8-A) 4* 1500MHz 64Bit |
| RAM | 64 MiB | up to 8 GiB |
| ROM/Storage | 64 MiB FlashROM up to 2 GiB Compactflash | up to 2 TiB m.2 NVME (Q2/2024) up to 1 TiB micro SD (Q2/2024) |
| Display / Resolution | 8.1" / DSTN / 640x240 | 6.86" / IPS / 1280x480 |
| Connectivity (LAN / WiFi / WWAN) | 56k Modem (v.90) 4 Mbps IrDA | 150Mbps LTE Modem Gigabit Ethernet WiFi Bluetooth |
| Connectivity (USB / HDMI / eg.) | 1* USB 1.1 Host 1* USB 1.1 Device 1* RS-232 1* VGA (640x240) | 4* USB 2.0 Host 1* HDMI (up to 4k@30fps) 1* Spare mPCIE-slot |
For several years I'm now using a Dell Latitude 5414 rugged, which is pretty nice for every day carry, but my priorities have shifted a bit towards a smaller portable Laptop which will mainly be used for note taking and browsing the web. So nothing fancy a Pi can't handle.
All in all, I started this project to have a small companion device, which replaces the Dell for every day use. The Dell will then be used for astrophotography and stuff like PLC programming.