But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.
Such as tracking you every moment of your waking life. How modern technology has become so evil, looking back. Nowadays every device we have is clearly spyware, from the point of view of 1999.
You could alter the video timings on the Jornada a bit, by writing to the video chip registers directly. That would slightly improve its abysmal contrast ratio.
I had one running NetBSD together with a Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving purposes. With the driver for the WiFi card patched to enable monitor mode. Had two different antennas, a quarter wave dipole, which I made myself, and also an Andrew QD-2402, a 16dBi antenna (!) that could receive WiFi APs from more than 20km away, when on high ground.
You could even develop software on it, compile programs with GCC, write Perl scripts to do various things, e.g. automatically scan for and connect to open access points as you walked around town. I think that script even tested if the access point had Internet access or not, and blacklisted ones that didn't. Worked really well, there were so many open access points back in the day. Also had the "links" / "eLinks" web browser, that was text only.
And you could also overclock the bus to the Epson video chip, to allow for faster display updates. The video chip had 2D acceleration, I might have written an XFree86 driver for that, but cannot be sure about it.
I also wrote a flashing tool for the WiFi card, that let you alter the regulatory domain settings to enable full 100mW power output, and also change the MAC address stored in Flash. I think I have the source code to that somewhere...
It's just so amazing to see that the functionality of that enormous WiFi card has now been shrunk down to a tiny QFN chip, an ESP32.