The NEW PDA 600 spec. by Cliff Lawson [Amstrad] 75300,1517 As promised, here is a brief summary of the main points of our revolutionary new pen based computer that was launched at the Science Museum on Thursday. Imagine if you will, a normal leather bound filofax. It is about 6" by 4" by 1" thick. You open the cover and there are six ring binders to the left and about 5 or 6 tabs down the right for accessing each section of it (Address book, Diary, To Do list, Notes pages and Information/ conversion pages). To actually use it you pick up your pen, turn to the diary (say) flick through to the page where you want to make and entry and start writing. You have just learnt how to use an Amstrad PenPad PDA600! You open the flap that covers its screen to reveal a rectangular 320 by 240 dot LCD panel with an overlying touch sensitive panel. Press the on/off button below the screen and you "open" the filofax at the front page. If you want to turn to the diary just touch the diary tab that is at the right hand side of the screen. You will then see a page that is half ruled and half blank. In the blank section at the bottom of the page you will find that if you just use the plastic pen to write on the screen the "ink" you write with appears naturally on the screen. The clever bit comes when you want to enter an appointment in computer recognised text at the top of the screen, on the ruled lines. Just touch one of the blank entries and a "recogniser" box appears. This has a small rectangular box for each character that you want to enter - you just write single characters into each box and the unit converts these into computer recognised characters as you go. You can write at normal speed - it is more than able to keep up with you. When you enter several diary appointments for a day you can give each a time and they will be sorted chronologically with any general (untimed entries) appearing at the top of the list. There are special functions accessed through the "desktop" icon on the screen that allow you to set anniversaries. That will then put the same entry into the diary on the same date until the end of time. What's more, it also puts a "Don't forget" reminder into the diary a week before to remind you to buy a card or present. There is also a function to allow you to enter regular meetings such as the 1st and third Monday of every month, the 17th of every month or every 2nd Tuesday say. If you touch the icon at the top left of the diary page the current entry will shrink down so that you can see all of this weeks entries. Just as in the day per page view, you can use the forward/backward icons above the screen to flick through the entries. If you then touch the icon at the top left of this screen you then get to a calendar view where you can easily flick through the months and days with a diary entry are shown with a box around them. The current date is also highlighted. Touching the telephone at the right of the screen takes you to the address book where you can enter (via the recogniser) up to two lines for the name (this is used to sort the entries into order). There are 5 lines for an address and four for various phone numbers to which you can also add a label such as "Office, fax, Home, etc". Below this there are seven lines for notes where you can put general information relating to the person or company. Any of the text in a record can later be searched for so you can put word such as "Restaurant" in the notes and later easily find all the restaurants in your address book. Touching the icon at the top left of this page will take you to a telephone list page format where all the As, Bs, Cs or whatever are listed together with their first phone number. Touching any entry on this page will open up the full address card that you select. A..Z tabs down the right of the page let you easily navigate around your address book and, as always, the fwd/back arrows can also be used to leaf through the book. When you first start to use the product you tell it which language you want to use (English, French, German, Italian or Spanish) and then, after setting the date and time you get to enter your own definitions of A..Z, a..z and 0..9. When you later come to use the recogniser it will initially make mistakes and you can try overwriting any wrongly interpreted characters to see if it will recognise your character on the second go. If not, you can bring up a panel to select the character and then enter up to four new definitions for it. After this you will probably find that it gets much better. If not, you can train some more. The system also scores hits on often matched characters so the more you use it, the better it gets at recognising your writing. At the launch Alan talked while I demonstrated to about 100 journos and 3 or 4 TV crews. Naturally I was a bit nervous and my writing was shaky but even so I was getting about 90% hit rate on the recognition. Other features accessed by the tabs down the right of the page are a To Do list which replaces all those scraps of paper and post it notes that you'd otherwise use (very useful for me!). You give each entry a date for completion and they are then sorted into chronological order. Also, a special "To Do" entry is put in the diary on the days you have entered. There is also a "free form" notes section that doesn't try to recognise your writing. Instead it is a bit like an endless "Etcha Sketch" where you can scribble in notes, diagrams, maps, doodles (and noughts and crosses!). When you are on the notes pages, touching the eraser icon above the screen will then turn the pen into a rubber and you can just rub things out a bit like the old rubber on the end of a pencil that you use in school. In any of the sections, when you want to delete a page you touch one of the six ringer binders at the left, the page shrinks to a 1/2 size mini version that you can then drag off screen with the pen - just like tearing pages out of a normal notebook. The fifth tab down the right of the screen selects several conversion pages where you can convert feet to meters, pounds to ounces, etc. You just touch one of the entry boxes, the recogniser appears and you write in a number. When you press "tick" the converted answer appears in the associated box. On the fourth page of conversions there are just a bunch of blank boxes to which you can assign labels (with the recogniser) and also a "factor" box in the middle that allows you to enter your own conversion factor. This is great for doing things like Ex Vat to Inc Vat conversions, or Pounds to Dollars, FOB to distributor to dealer, to ex VAT to Inc VAT conversion, etc, etc. From an icon on the top of the screen you can access the calculator which is a pretty standard desktop calculator with the simple functions. It also prints a "paper roll" on screen so you can keep track of previous entries you have made in a calculation. Selecting the desktop icon brings up a panel of about 15 other functions. There are things like anniversary, search and regular meetings that have already been mentioned. Search works in any of the recognised text sections (addr book, diary or to do). There is also a simple clock, a 6 country world time zone clock where you can easily change the offsets and assign labels for various places. The calendar that has already been mentioned can be accessed from the desktop so you can easily switch to the day in the diary from any section. There are gauges for the battery life and memory usage. Touching the alarm clock icon brings up a panel that allows you to set one of the ten possible alarms. Each can be once only or repeated and can have an associated message with it that pops up in a window on screen. If the unit is switched off when an alarm rings it will automatically switch itself on. Another desktop icon allows you to select thin, medium or thick ink for when you are scribbling in the notes pages or the bottom half of diary pages. The card icon allows you to tell the unit when you have added a PCMCIA card containing either more RAM or an application program (we have several planned including WP, spreadsheet, fax and many others). The I/O arrows allow you to either send or receive data through the units RS232 connector. We have a non-standard plug so you do need a special cable but other than that it is pretty normal 9600 RS232 and I have captured text data in programs such as Telix. We are also adding the ability to send the scribbled notes pages in Windows .BMP format but this will require some special PC software. The final desktop icon allows you to setup the unit. It can be recalibrated if you hold the pen at an unusual angle. You can also choose to completely re-train the recogniser library which is quite a good idea when you have got passed the early experimentation stage. The date can be set as can the language be. You can also enter your name and number that appear on the front page when you first switch on. Features * Pocket sized electronic organiser with pen-based input * Full hand writing recognition * User friendly, symbol driven "pen touch" interface * Auto sorted Address List with 'any word' search function * Auto compiled telephone list with search * Infinite diary with day, week or month per page view and To Do list * 'Scribble and save' note taker * Preset and customisable conversion tables * World Time clock and multiple alarms * Full function 'paper roll' calculator Specification * Multi-processor architecture * User friendly software with border and on-screen pen activated symbols * High resolution LCD (240 by 320 dots) with overlaid pen sensing digitiser * 70 by 93 mm display area * 192K total RAM with 32K dedicated for the screen, 32K for holding recogniser character definitions and the other 128K for data storage. * PCMCIA card slot for memory expansion (up to 2Mb) and ROM card based apps. * Mini serial interface port for printing and data transfer * Battery usage 40 hours from 3 AA Duracell alkaline cells * Lithium battery for data safety while changing batteries - will maintain the unit for about 5-6 years. * 3 pens supplied as standard (you can actually use your finger nail but we don't recommend it!) * Inbuilt speaker and real time clock * Dimensions 115 x 160 x 27 mm * Weight 400 grams (about 14 ounces). Cliff Lawson PenPad project manager Amstrad plc