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Fri, 08 Nov 2002
Okay, so I was dragged out of bed at the horrifying hour of seven thirty in the morning to answer the doorbell. It was a postman bearing a large jiffy bag containing the new writing implement for review. That was about two hours ago. What do I make of it so far?
(To recap: I'm a writer. I've been interested in seeing an AlphaSmart Dana, so I contrived to get hold of one of the first ones to arrive in the UK so I could review it for Shopper -- and at the same time see if it fits my own personal needs. It's not available via the shops yet, if ever, so most prospective purchasers are faced with a dilemma. Lucky me.)
This is not a Computer Shopper review; this is my personal take on the machine. Shopper gets a rather different take, in a week or two's time.
First impressions: it's about as solidly built as the Cambridge Z88 of yore, Sir Clive Sinclair's semi-legendary ultraportable writing machine. The Z88 was sized to occupy exactly the same footprint as a 200-sheed pad of A4 writing paper. The Dana is curvier but fits inside the same footprint; it's wedge-shaped, lowest at the front and higher at the back, with a screen recessed half a centimetre into the body behind the keyboard. (See www.flydana.com for the gory pictures.) There are one or two minor molding artefacts on the sample machine's plastic case, but nothing complaint-worthy -- and in general the build quality seems fine.
Keyboard: it's as good as the best laptop I've used. Seriously. They didn't cut corners on this aspect of the machine.
Screen: after a decade of bulky flip-up laptop LCDs, it's a bit of a culture shock to go back to a recessed built-in black-and-white (or rather, black-on-green) LCD. However, it's better than I'd expected. The contrast is comparable to one of the better black-and-white Palm Pilots (such as the M105). Resolution at 160 x 560 is same height as a Palm, but 3.5 times wider. In size, it's physically bigger than the Z88's screen, and much clearer than the Z88 was (even straight out of the box). It's not comparable to a bleeding-edge colour palmtop screen, but neither's the battery life.
The PalmOS environment isn't notorious for its good font handling, but there's a utility that can manage fonts on your machine and the built-in AlphaWord word processor -- a port of the excellent Wordsmith word processor for PalmOS, with added wide-screen capability (see www.bluenomad.com) -- can use them. One catch: the utility to convert TrueType fonts for use on PalmOS runs only on Windows. Bummer, I guess I'll have to crank up WINE on one of the Linux boxen.
Operating system: the Dana runs PalmOS 4. This is roughly comparable to an old MacOS system -- say 5.0 -- except that PalmOS is application- centric and doesn't really like working with files; only recently has it even acquired the concept of separate mountable volumes with subdirectories. Well, that's okay; if you're used to PalmOS you'll figure out the Dana within five minutes without opening the manual. There are some rough edges, of course. Most of the standard apps haven't been re-written to take advantage of the wide screen -- they hover in the middle of it in a little PalmOS square, with the soft grafitti area off to the right or left. (Like the Palm Tungsten T or the HandEra 330, the Graffiti area isn't silk-screened onto the screen but is generated in software and can be hidden when it isn't needed.)
The Dana has 8Mb of RAM built-in, and like newer PalmOS devices, you can install applications on SD cards (as well as saving files on them) to conserve built-in memory. It took my 128Mb SD card without complaint and still has a slot free for another memory card or a Bluetooth or 802.11 SDIO card (when I get my hands on one). If you can imagine a Z88 with a good screen, a non-rubber keyboard, 128Mb of non-volatile storage and a wireless ethernet card, this is the beast: it's a little dizzying.
Applications: I've yet to try out the stuff on the CDROM, including a modified version of the Palm Desktop (that can support a Dana as well as an ordinary PDA), a version of QuickOffice that does wide-screen stuff, an email client that can handle POP3 accounts, and so on. It all looks pretty much like you'd expect.
Batteries: the built-in NiMH pack is charging right now. Takes four hours to charge full from empty, runs for about 25 hours. You can buy spares for US $10, or use three 'AA' cells instead. Minor complaint: the battery compartment cover is secured shut with a screw. This is probably appropriate to the education market, but I can see journalists losing the screw pretty damn fast.
So what's my overall verdict?
It's early days yet and I haven't had the thing long enough to use it in anger. There are some minor rough edges with the OS, but nothing major; it's basically a laptop that runs PalmOS. But the screen and keyboard are better than I'd expected, the design is good, and I actually think I could do serious work on this beast. If what you want is something to sling in a briefcase or backpack that's light enough you won't notice it, powerful enough to cope with the word processing and check your email, cheap enough it won't kill you if it goes missing, and entirely independent of the mains socket, this is the biz.
Later: I've spent a day with it now. There are some not-so-fun rough edges; the AlphaWord conduit seems to be allergic to either MacOS X 10.2 (or to the setup on my iBook), so I'm having trouble getting work on and off it. (Which is a bit of a bummer, although I could make an end-run around it by buying an SD card reader.) Some PalmOS apps work okay on the wide screen, but others provide a most amusingly screwed- up display. Not many apps support widescreen yet, so you're stuck for now with programs running in the middle of the screen, or the stuff that came bundled with the machine.
Despite these caveats, it's a kick-ass gadget; the second coming of the Cambridge Z88 or Tandy Model 100. Not a laptop but a laptop-alternative, that goes places you wouldn't necessarily want to take a machine worth a month's income. I really like it, and if the AlphaWord synchronisation problem goes away I'll be quite happy.
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