Mobile magic
Do you ever need to use a keyboard on the run? Charles Arthur reports on the mobile phones and handhelds that fold out into fully fledged laptops
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Your support makes all the difference.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, said Arthur C Clarke. Well, we're not quite there yet, but it has to be said that when it comes to the proper integration of mobile phones and handhelds, things are looking up.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, said Arthur C Clarke. Well, we're not quite there yet, but it has to be said that when it comes to the proper integration of mobile phones and handhelds, things are looking up.
I am writing this on a train; no big deal, you may reckon. Except that I'm not using a laptop. I have a tiny keyboard that folds out, and when I've finished I'm going to e-mail it from my Handspring computer (on which I'm reading what I write) straight to the office. Never shall a desktop computer touch it, until it lands. Which is what mobile computing ought to be about, after all. While I know that I've previously considered the Handspring Treo and the RIM Blackberry, which are both intended to be used on the run, and that we're reviewing the newest (colour) Treo below, there are some things that those don't bring.
In particular, neither has a working, full-size keyboard. Getting lots of data into a PDA can be hell if you're limited to their standard input devices – either the "wand" of the standard Palm, Handspring and PocketPC systems, or the tiddly nubs ("keys" is too grand, like calling bonsai "shrubbery") of the Treo and Blackberry.
The saviour, for those who actually need to do some writing on the move, is the Targus Stowaway keyboard, whose benefits I didn't really come to realise until I was out of the office recently and needed to do a lot of typing.
The Stowaway surely deserves as many design prizes as can be found, for putting a full-size keyboard into something that folds up into a package the same size as the Palm or Handspring it attaches to. The keys also have a real keyboard feel – a short, positive travel, comfortable to write on.
So far, so good; but what software is there? For Palm systems, if all you want to do is write then I recommend WordSmith, from Blue Nomad ( www.bluenomad.com). It's powerful enough to have most of the functions – thesaurus, spellcheck, word counts, formatting (including bold, italic, footnotes, bookmarks, fonts and comments) that you'd ever need on a desktop computer, but small enough to fit in 500K of storage. (The Handspring Treo 90 includes a copy of Wordsmith; I suspect Targus are working on a keyboard.) Once you've written the files on your PDA, they are automatically synchronised with your PC the next time you hook up; they appear as "rich text" files, which Word (or any word processor) can open easily.
If you need to work on more sophisticated files, such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, then you should look to Dataviz's "Documents To Go", which can handle all those bigger files. It's not cheap ($70 for a single-user licence) but there might be a time when it's a saviour.
What about the e-mail? That's an aspect of the elegant approach that Handspring is abandoning – though if you move fast enough, you could get in on it. The Springport Wireless Data GSM from Xircom (owned by Intel) plugs into the back of the older Handspring models (the Visor, Prism and so on) and lets you send and receive e-mails at GSM speeds. It's touted as letting you surf the web, but as GSM runs at about 9.6 kb/s, six times slower than a home modem, that's only for the masochistic.
Versions are available for most Nokia phones, and at £75 it's good value if you need to get at, or send, an important document. The e-mail program is built-in (as is an SMS program), though you won't thank anyone who habitually attaches megabyte-sized picture files. For that reason, it's probably better to send than receive. (And if you're reading this, you know it works, don't you?) While it might be slow, at least it's working now – and the bundle is cheaper than a Treo, for example. Newer and smaller isn't always better.
Wordsmith (from www.bluenomad.com), $29.95 (£19); Documents To Go, www.dataviz.com, $69.95 (£44.55); Targus Stowaway keyboard, £65 (ex VAT); www.targus.co.uk; Xircom GSM Springport, £75 (ex VAT); via Dabs.com or other online sellers
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