| No matter what hardware is inside or how the operating
system works, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) must
provide valuable applications and be easy to use if they
are to succeed. In general, the Apple Newton MessagePad
and the Tandy/Casio Zoomer have accomplished both, but
perhaps not well enough for their ultimate target
audience, the computer-illiterate consumer. The pen interface, with its finicky handwriting recognition, requires patience. The number of applications is limited for now. And communications capabilities are still incomplete; you can only send faxes, and the wireless infrastructure that will provide many of the promised information services is still being built. The Eo Personal Communicator is not a true PDA, but it provides an example of how well a portable, wireless communications device can be built using the technology and services available today. MessagePad Stretches to Fit Using the MessagePad is like breaking in a new pair of shoes. You might experience a few pinches at first, but eventually they stretch to fit you. The MessagePad fits snugly in the hand, measuring 7 1/4 by 4 1/2 inches and three-quarters of an inch thick. The unit weighs nine-tenths of a pound. It's equipped with 4 MB of ROM that contains the Newton Intelligence and the following applications: Notepad, Date, and Name. The 640 KB of static RAM holds the Newton Intelligence's working data, and about 200 KB is free for your use. It's powered by a 20-MHz ARM610 (Advanced RISC machine) RISC processor. The text interpreter works well. It recognized the first three words of the message "handwriting recognition fairly hit-and-miss," but it came up with gibberish for the last phrase. The reason for this error was the two hyphens. According to a draft copy of the MessagePad Handbook, punctuation must be placed close to the words to be recognized properly. Because the recognizer uses dictionaries and name lists (i.e., your own additions to the dictionary) for the recognition process, the results of its handwriting interpretation are frighteningly accurate or a hodgepodge of obscure words and numbers. Nevertheless, the recognizer is very adept at handling certain writing idiosyncrasies. For instance, we found that dotting all the i's after writing a word didn't bother the recognizer a bit. A Handwriting Practice section gives you practice words to write so that Newton Intelligence can adapt to your writing style. It takes about 150 words to train the text interpreter. When you use a MessagePad for the first time, it pays off to spend a half-hour or more in this section giving the recognizer time to study your penmanship. In the Handwriting Styles section, a slider lets you specify how much of your writing is cursive, printed, or a mixture of the two. A Recognition Preferences section lets you fine-tune both the handwriting recognizer and graphics interpreter for certain situations (e.g., in text, to recognize numbers and punctuation; in graphics, whether to connect shapes in a drawing). Once the MessagePad was trained to recognize an individual's handwriting, its text recognition was more impressive than that of the Zoomer or Eo 440. Still, be prepared to use Undo and practice the gestures you must use to make corrections. Another nice feature of the MessagePad is that you can select an object (e.g., a chunk of text or a drawing), "park" it by dragging it to the screen's edge, flip to another Newton application, and drag the object into that application. It's a nice visual metaphor for a clipboard that should be easy for the noncomputer user to grasp. Also, programs can control what type of information gets placed in an object. For example, when you enter your phone number in the Personal area, the window you write in accepts only digits. This goes a long way toward reducing user errors. To test printing capability, we first scribbled a note in Notepad and then plugged the MessagePad into a LocalTalk node on BYTE's AppleTalk network. From the Outbox, a printer-selection window showed the various network zones and PostScript printers. We tapped on a printer name, tapped on the Close box, and then tapped on a Print button. A minute later, a duplicate of the note appeared on a page coming out of a LaserWriter Pro 630. An attempt at faxing the note didn't fare so well, however. Lacking a MessagePad fax modem, we plugged a Global Village TelePort/Gold fax modem into the MessagePad's serial port. According to the status window that appeared, the MessagePad was attempting to connect to the modem, but it never succeeded. So much for using third-party modems at the moment, but remember, we were looking at beta hardware and software. For third-party hardware, we received a 2-MB PCMCIA RAM card from Epson. We put it into the card slot and switched the MessagePad on. Although this card was originally designed for PC notebooks, the MessagePad recognized it and asked us to erase it. After several seconds, we had an additional 2 MB of memory — a good show for Apple PIE (Personal Integrated Electronics), Epson, and hardware standards. The Newton Intelligence allows you to file individual schedules and notes to the RAM card or make a backup of all the MessagePad's data to it. From the Notepad application, we wrote "See Rob Monday at 10"; after we tapped on the Assist button, Newton Assistance opened the Date Scheduling application, found the upcoming Monday's date, and then dropped a note saying "See Rob" into the 10:00 a.m. slot on the appropriate day. Judging from just the built-in Notepad, Name, and Date applications, the MessagePad doesn't seem much of a win. After all, you can use a low-tech schedule book and business cards to arrange meetings and stay in touch. However, a MessagePad equipped with a fax modem and a Messaging Card changes the situation: You can fire off a diagram or a note to a contact's fax or E-mail address from nearly anywhere. The Messaging Card — actually a wireless pager that receives text messages — in turn lets your contacts get back to you immediately. For those folks who are on the road constantly but must still make quick business decisions, the MessagePad might be a solution. Third-party Newton applications may make a case for owning a MessagePad. Fodor's 1994 Travel Manager program from GeoSystems lets you call up maps of the eight largest cities in the U.S., locate hotels, and obtain their phone numbers (see the screen on page 92). Selecting a hotel in, say, Boston gets you a map of the city with a diamond icon pointing out where that hotel is located. Tapping on the diamond zooms you in on a map of the city block, complete with street names. You can then summon a From/To window, where you can drop in the hotel's name and the name of a restaurant you've already located. You then get either street-by-street directions or a line on the map tracing the route from the hotel to the restaurant. The ability to navigate through a new city using the MessagePad shows its value as a general-purpose device, given the proper software. For vertical markets, the MessagePad's light weight, combined with the ability of Newton Intelligence to restrict the types of data entry it will allow, makes it suitable for forms handling. For example, an insurance company's accident form might allow text entries in some sections and only numbers in other sections and provide an area where a field agent can sketch an accident scene using only ink. The synergy of Newton's Intelligent Assistance together with the object database is what makes the MessagePad a winner. The ability of Newton Intelligence and applications to locate information within the system and then act on it in rational ways is a major improvement over desktop operating systems. Once a contact's relevant information (i.e., address, phone number, fax number, and E-mail address) is captured in a MessagePad loaded with communications options, you can call that person, fax him or her, schedule appointments, or send the person E-mail with a few stylus strokes. Newton Intelligence eliminates the many redundant operations (i.e., launching an application, locating a file, opening the file, and then searching for the desired data within the file) that you have to do on a desktop computer to accomplish the same thing, and it's a model that desktop computers should adopt. The MessagePad's implementation of this intelligent assistant is by no means perfect, but it's a huge step in the right direction. Zoomer: Hands-On Tandy's version is called the Z-PDA, and Casio's model is known as the XL-7000, but the two are virtually identical PDAs known collectively as the Zoomer. Software, peripherals, and accessories bearing the Zoomer name are compatible with either device, and a pair of Zoomers can exchange information via their 9600-bps wireless infrared transceivers. The Zoomer bears a strong resemblance to Apple's MessagePad, and indeed they have several features in common: a touch-sensitive LCD screen with a passive stylus; 4 MB of ROM, containing all the system software and built-in applications; a simplified pen-oriented user interface; a Type 2 PCMCIA slot for add-in cards; and an infrared transceiver for sharing data with compatible devices. The Zoomer measures 6 4/5 by 4 1/5 inches and is 1 inch thick. It weighs 1 pound. On the street, both PDAs sell for around $700. Internally, however, the Zoomer and the MessagePad are different animals. The Zoomer has a 7.5-MHz 8088-compatible CPU made by Casio and runs a pen-based version of GEOS, a desktop operating system from GeoWorks. The Zoomer has a character-by-character handwriting recognizer that reads only block printing, not cursive writing, and it is not trainable. It has a little more RAM than the MessagePad (1 MB instead of 640 KB) and sets aside more of that RAM for storing user data (384 KB, versus about 200 KB for the MessagePad). The Zoomer also has more built-in software — particularly content-oriented software. Standard applications (all written by Palm Computing) include a date book, an address book, a notebook, a to-do-list manager, a calculator, a dictionary with 60,000 definitions, a 100,000-word spelling checker, a 660,000-word thesaurus, translation dictionaries (1000 words in 26 languages), world clocks, a form calculator (including measurement and currency conversions), and an almanac listing U.S. holidays, area codes, information on cities around the world, and even the complete text of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Intuit contributed Pocket Quicken, a mobile version of its best-selling personal finance program, and America Online provided a terminal program that lets users send E-mail, access on-line information, and download software. Of course, to get on-line you'll need a modem. A PCMCIA fax modem for the Zoomer is in the works, but you can connect just about any external modem via the RS-232 port. An optional adapter cable converts the subminiature 10-pin D-type connector into a standard DB-9 connector. With appropriate software, this will also allow the Zoomer to exchange files with desktop computers. The Zoomer is powered by three AA batteries, and alkalines are rated for about 100 hours of use. Two CR2032 lithium cells preserve your RAM-based data if the main batteries go dead or need changing. Flipping back a protective plastic cover reveals the Zoomer's 320- by 256-pixel passive-matrix LCD screen, which measures 80 by 100 millimeters. Contrast is rather low, but the screen is readable in normal light. There's no backlighting, so you can't use the Zoomer in the dark. The screen, of course, doubles as your input device. Writing on the Zoomer is easy — almost too easy. Because the plastic stylus glides across the slick surface with less resistance than that of a pencil on paper, it feels a little strange at first. But you'll adjust quickly. If you lose the stylus, any implement that isn't too sharp will work just as well. (The programmers at Palm seem to favor wooden chopsticks.) How good is the Zoomer's handwriting recognition? That's the gritty question everyone asks about pen-based devices, even though many PDAs (including the Zoomer) are designed to minimize freehand translation. On the Zoomer, for example, you can navigate through most functions merely by tapping icons with the stylus, and you can switch off the recognizer to save your writing as digital ink. But eventually you will want to write something and see it translated, because that's the only way to create information on the machine, unless you pop up the on-screen QWERTY keyboard. Some Zoomer proponents are enthusiastic about tapping letters on the keyboard; they say it's easy to learn and is often faster than relying on the recognizer. Their first point may be true, but it raises the question of why you'd want to use a QWERTY keyboard on a pen-based PDA when the market is already crowded with similar devices that have real QWERTY keyboards. And the second point, unfortunately, also appears to be true: Handwriting recognition on the beta version of the Zoomer we tested was slow and not as reliable as we'd hoped. It usually takes several seconds for the recognizer to convert a word into text. After you write a few words, the delay begins to add up, and you have to wait until it's finished converting, because there's no room on the screen to write anything more. Then you have to go back and correct the words it misinterprets. The Zoomer's recognizer isn't trainable, but you are. Don't be surprised if you start bending to the Zoomer's demands. For example, one of us normally prints an uppercase M by drawing two vertical strokes joined with a V. The Zoomer got it wrong every time; it prefers to see an M drawn with a single zig-zag line. He soon began pleasing the Zoomer by changing his style, which has been burned into his ROM since the first grade. Although the Zoomer's architecture can accommodate a different recognition engine, such as the ParaGraph recognizer on the MessagePad, that's not likely to happen until the hardware gets more powerful. The Zoomer's PalmPrint recognizer needs only about 48 KB of memory, and it's one of the few engines that runs on a CPU as slow as the Zoomer's 8088-class chip. A faster Zoomer would not only eliminate the annoying translation delays, but it would also enable Palm — or another company — to build a better recognizer. Aside from the handwriting-recognition problems, we found the Zoomer a joy to use. The user interface is simple and straightforward. The date book and address book are logically organized, and we especially liked the ability to attach a hand-sketched map of directions to an address entry. The content-oriented material adds a lot to the Zoomer, although we wonder if there aren't better uses for the ROM than throwing in such things as birthstones, zodiac signs, and historical documents. We would vote for a generic terminal program that isn't dedicated to America Online, or even a chess game. The Zoomer lends itself to games, of course. Its front panel has a directional pad and a pair of control buttons, just like a Nintendo Game Boy. The Zoomer will probably ship with a couple of simple games to get you started. Considering their radically different hardware and software architectures, it's remarkable how closely the Zoomer compares with the higher-tech Newton. Their hidden differences will undoubtedly become more apparent as they evolve. And further evolution is mandatory before either platform is likely to reach its goal of bringing personal computing to the masses. Eo: The Road Less Traveled The smallest Eo, the 3-pound 440, dwarfs true PDAs. It's roughly the size of a subnotebook PC, measuring 10 4/5 by 7 1/10 inches and nine-tenths of an inch thick. Eo calls its systems Personal Communicators, which emphasizes their greatest strength. Portability and battery life (about an hour) were sacrificed to optimize the system for wireless communications. For on-the-road communications, Eo's Personal Communicators are armed to the teeth. Both have a 14.4-Kbps cellular modem with 9.6-Kbps fax capability, along with Go Mail and Go Fax software. SunSelect's PenTops provides connectivity to your desktop and to LANs. Eo Sound allows you to voice-annotate a document. The unit's larger screen aids in creating and viewing faxed forms and documents. A detachable phone headset provides voice connections. To top it off, you get a free subscription to AT&T Mail. Of course, you'd better get extras like this: Prices for the Eo 440 start at $2800 with a hard drive and modem. Go Corp.'s PenPoint operating system provides the pencentric interface. If you've used PenPoint on, say, a 386 system, be prepared for a surprise when you run it on the Eo 440 — performance is dramatically better. That's because of the Eo 440's 20-MHz AT&T Hobbit CPU. With 13 MIPS to work with, PenPoint runs at a snappy pace. If you need even more speed, the Eo 880's 30-MHz Hobbit processor cranks out 20 MIPS, but the cost is a bigger unit that weighs 4 pounds. Using the Eo's communications features is easy, but not completely foolproof. Even though we received a crash course in sending a fax via the Eo's cellular modem, we had trouble repeating the process later — without reading the documentation. To fax a note from the Eo 440, you go to the Document menu item and select Send. Send gives you the option of choosing Go Fax or Go Mail (for selecting AT&T Mail). Selecting Go Fax brings up a cover sheet form on which you can write a note. After you fill in the name and number of the person you're sending the fax to — data you can either select with a few pen taps from a database or write in — Go Fax places the note in the Outbox. From here, it becomes unclear what you need to do, as no prompt appears on the screen. To finish sending the fax, you go to the Outbox and tap on the Enabled box. A Dialing Location box then appears so that you can confirm or change information such as where you're dialing from, whether you wish to use a calling card, and so on. From this point, things are pretty automatic. Go Mail follows a similar process, but it has options such as selecting a file format for sending your fax. This is not an onerous procedure for the Eo's target business user. But Apple and other PDA vendors cannot expect customers who have never used a cellular phone or a modem to embrace this kind of a ritual. Immediate gratification is key; PDA users should only have to make a couple of selections to make the connection they desire. The PenPoint interface is easy to use, but a little less so than that of the MessagePad or the Zoomer. PenPoint has more menu and file layers. With its book-like table of contents, however, PenPoint could be easily adapted to provide a familiar interface metaphor for novice users. Our hands-on experience with these first PDAs shows that their ease of use is relative to the expectations of the user. Savvy computer users would say that the MessagePad, Zoomer, and Eo 440 are highly intuitive. Yet all have too many quirks and rough edges to make it in the mass consumer market. Screen: The MessagePad features a row of "hard icons" at the bottom of the screen that provide access to frequently used functions. Screen: The Zoomer emphasizes ink capture over handwriting recognition, which suffers from a slow, 8-bit processor. Tom Thompson is a BYTE senior technical editor at large. Tom R. Halfhill is a BYTE senior news editor. Michael Nadeau is a BYTE senior editor. You can reach them on BIX as "tom_thompson," "thalfhill," and "miken," respectively. Copyright 1994-1997 BYTE |