06/15/98 HP'S COOL LAPTOP IS HARD TO USE

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HP'S COOL LAPTOP IS HARD TO USE
Sojourn is a real head-turner. Too bad its keyboard makes typing difficult
Compromise is the essence of laptop designs. Severe limits on size, weight, and power consumption have forced engineers and customers to make some tough choices. Today's consensus business machine weighs about 6 pounds, has a 12- or 13-inch display, offers interchangeable floppy and CD-ROM drives, can be used as a desktop replacement, and will cost you about $3,000.
Then there is the Hewlett-Packard Sojourn. Designed in partnership with Mitsubishi as the ultimate in executive mobility, it's the epitome of drop-dead cool. True, it costs $5,800 and features a keyboard that, at best, makes it hard to type accurately. But that won't stop quite a few of these from turning up on first-class airplane tray-tables--and turning the heads of passengers who spot them.
LAYER CAKE. Sojourn provides a glimpse of what the future of laptops might be now that they've become the Swiss Army Knife of the digital age, suitable as desktop computers, portable links to the office, or multimedia presentation devices. Sojourn is a flexible notebook designed in three ''slices'' that fit together like a layer cake. The top slice makes Sojourn uniquely thin and light. Using just this keyboard-screen section provides a 233 MHz Pentium processor (no room for a Pentium II), 64 megabytes of memory, a 2.1-gigabyte hard drive, and 12.1-inch active matrix display, all housed in a sleek black and gray magnesium case just 0.71 inches thick and weighing 3.2 pounds. The design originally called for a new type of lithium polymer battery that would have provided more design flexibility, but various problems forced HP to settle for the more conventional lithium ion.
This thin, light laptop would strike me as nearly perfect for most uses, particularly travel, were it not for one thing. The case isn't deep enough to hold a conventional keyboard. Instead, Sojourn uses a membrane keyboard like those on calculators. Despite full-size key spacing, I found that without the normal up-and-down motion on the keys, it was very difficult to type. With limited tactile feedback, it's hard to tell whether you've actually pressed a key or not. Making things worse, the entire keyboard flexes a little when a key, especially one toward the center of the layout, is pressed. As a result, I expect that the main audience for the Sojourn will be executives who use laptops more often to peruse documents than to create them and whose typing consists mainly of brief replies to E-mail messages.
The Sojourn is in a tradition of ultra-compact notebooks with no room for internal floppy or CD-ROM drives, but it is the most extreme design yet. It is limited to two side-by-side PC Card slots, an infrared port, and a universal serial bus connector. The USB port will become more useful when USB accessories hit the market, but for now, there's no way to attach a printer or an external drive to the basic Sojourn.
Instead, HP followed an approach pioneered by Digital Equipment with its HiNote Ultra and since followed by other laptop makers, including Compaq, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. A slice clamps to the bottom to provide serial and parallel ports, floppy and CD-ROM drives, a pair of pop-out speakers, and other features.
The combination is a full-featured laptop with a short battery life of 90 minutes or so. A second slice, an $800 option that can be used with or without the multimedia unit, quadruples battery power. In its maximum configuration, at 8.2 pounds, the Sojourn is a match in bulk, if not performance, for such heavyweights as the Toshiba Tecra 780 and the IBM ThinkPad 770.
A PAIN. All in all, the Sojourn is tantalizing. I love the idea of a laptop that can slide into a briefcase and barely be noticed. But I wrote this column on a Sojourn, and it was a pain. I'd gladly trade a few millimeters of thickness for a real keyboard. I feel that a modular concept can be a compelling choice for road warriors: You can take what you need when you need it. On many trips, I would take a Sojourn-style notebook and maybe the battery slice, leaving the multimedia unit at home or packed in my luggage.
To date, no slice design has become a best-seller, and Sojourn is too expensive and extreme to change that. Next week, I will review a new crop of more conventional laptops that most people will find appealing--and useful. For now, the Sojourn remains a design concept whose time is near.
BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM

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