So, what about the Operating System you ask. Well for starters (and as you might expect!) it is certainly lacking the "personality" that I have always loved in the Newton. I miss being able to scribble out mistakes; I miss the 'Puff of smoke' when something is deleted; I miss the site of notes being crumpled and thrown in the rubbish (trash for all the Yanks on the list); and I miss the sense of fun that, at least on the earlier Newts, gave us the "egg freckles" & "eclipse" Easter eggs. Microsoft would not want us to forget that the Pocket PC is a serious business tool!
That aside, I am generally pretty happy with the OS. I have seen the earlier versions (on the Palm-sized PC) and it was a bit of a mess, but the Pocket PC version is fairly clutter free. The drop down menus are easy to use and with the addition of a couple of add on I have pretty much everything that I want. Dashboard (no relation to the Newt programme of the same name) gives me a customisable, skinable today screen - now if only I could get around to doing a Avi's Backdrop skin! Wisbar customises the task bar and gives me an easy task switcher/manager and a few other additions.
Really this is no different to the Newt as far as I am concerned. There is no denying that the standard Newton OS has a graceful simplicity about it that the Pocket PC cannot match, but which of us does not have their Newt decked out with their favorite UI enhancements. I use i++ and Avi's Backdrop on my uMP2k and my MP130 to achieve pretty much the same effect that I have on the Pocket PC.
Memory management on the Pocket PC seems very different to on the Newt (although I am no expert here). The system memory (in my case 16megs) is dynamically split between storage and programme memory - the more stuff on the device the less elbow room for running programmes. So far, in my experience 16 megs seems fine if you are only using your device for organisation and Pocket Office stuff. For serious internet use or serious gaming then 32 megs would better. I see this as being a bit like the difference between a stock MP2k and a uMP2k or Mp2.1k. I have had the system freeze on me everynow and then and it probably needs to be reset more than my Newts. It does not seem to handle reclaiming unused programme memory as well as it perhaps could.
Although the Transcriber/Calligrapher HWR does not come pre-loaded in ROM it is very good once installed. I find it compares very well with the Newton's Rosetta HWR and you can certainly see legacy of the Paragraph developed cursive HWR on the Newton (ironically I never use the Cursive recogniser on the Newton). It is well integrated into the 0S and useable petty much everywhere text entry is needed (I am writing this with it).
That said, it is still not quite up to the Newton standard. Particularly annoying is the way that the software uses a type of deferred recognition where the conversion does not take place until you stop writing rather than in a smooth constant flow like on the Newton. This is even more annoying given the much more limited screen space available.
While I am talking about input methods: the voice recording is easy to use and good quality. The addition of an external record button is also a useful feature.
Well I do not want to bore you all so I will leave it there for the moment. More later.
Stephen Beesley
(posting to the Newtontalk forum from a Pocket PC - heresy I hear you say!)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Sep 09 2001 - 19:47:52 EDT