The eMate 300 is a small laptop-like PDA that Apple sold in 1997-1998. It was initially targeted only to the educational market but was later sold commercially. It’s got a design which I consider to be extremely cool – even today 12 years later it stands out as a unique device!
Background
High school
eMate 300 - photo from sebpayne @ Flickr
When I was in grade 8, my high school had a pretty small-scale tech “trade show” which was largely a bunch of companies wanting to sell their educational software and so on. Because the IT teacher at the time had a good impression of me, I was recruited to help out with getting things set up and was allowed to check out the exhibitors’ booths. Of course I was fairly uninterested in the vast majority of the exhibitors’ products due to the market they were all targeting – schools.
Amongst all of the educational “crapware”, there was a company (some Apple reseller) that had a decent selection of Apple-related items. These guys had their fair share of redundant educational software for sure, but one thing I was absolutely stoked to see was an eMate 300!
Anyway, I had been interested in the eMate 300 for a while as I was really wanting some kind of portable computer I could take around with me. So, I took a few minutes to try it out at this tech fair and of course I wanted one more than ever. Not that that was enough to get my parents to get me one. 
After long enough I pretty much forgot about the eMate, but something had recently reminded me of them, and I impulsively checked on eBay to see what they were going for.
eBay FTW
I ended up finding an eBay item listing for a complete eMate 300 box with all documentation and AC adapter and so on. I think the price ended up coming to about $80 USD after shipping and so on (I’ll have to check this as I forget). Actually, there was some mixup with the seller as they randomly disappeared off eBay and I thought I had been scammed. Fortunately they shipped the eMate anyways after I emailed them basically saying “ship it or give me a refund”.
So, the packaged showed up, and I was totally shocked to find that it was still in the original box, with the original shipping label showing recipient address of a Portland Oregon elementary school! Very cool. I was also very surprised to find that the AC adapter cable had not been unwrapped from the twist-tie, however it’s very possible a new one had been added to replace an old worn-out one. No clue. However, I’m leaning towards the notion that the eMate was just never used, because it was clean as hell and didn’t have a single speck of dust anywhere. Not to mention, when I turned on the machine, it had either been factory-reset, or was still “new” from the factory. Because of all this, I’m led to believe that the eMaet was just stored away and never used. The eMate itself was still in the original bag inside the box (although had been opened).
When I started up the machine, like I said it had either been factory-reset or was still new from the factory, prompting for various system settings. Now, this leads us into what kind of tasks I’ve got on hand to get this thing “usable” in a modern age of 24/7 interconnectivity…
Plans
Battery repack
The eMate’s battery will not hold a charge, probably because it’s 11 or 12 years old. Fortunately, the battery pack in an eMate is actually just a simple pack of 4 Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries. These can be easily purchased from pretty much anywhere, and there are quite a few different places describing the process of repacking a fresh set of batteries.
Networking
Another thing that makes the eMate so surprisingly cool is that you can not only get online, but you can do it wirelessly. It’s one thing that keeps the eMate surprisingly popular even today. I have a couple of old PCMCIA network cards, one of them being a rebranded WaveLAN card, which works out perfectly because this is exactly the card that a skilled developer in Japan wrote his own drivers for! Only problem for me right now is having a machine to transfer the software with – I’m not going to shell out $80+ for a USB<->Serial cable, so I’ll wait until I get the chance to grab my old PowerTower Pro 225 and get it hooked up to the eMate (so I can transfer all of the networking-related software packages).
Update: I’ve now got the eMate 300 online over 802.11b . Check my posting about the process , if you are interested!
morning photo taken w/iPhone
