gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (02/28/90)
[Point-of-view note: I've been looking for a computer I could use like
a pad of paper: carry it around, write on it with a stylus, read
things on it, with the important addition that it would communicate
back to my 'real' computers at home, preferably online at all times,
using X windows or even telnet or kermit. Even something that I could
just read netnews and mail on, and send short email replies with, while
carrying it around my house or office like a book, would be worth a few
grand to me.]
I played with a GridPad today. It's worth digging up the local Grid
office and messing with it for an hour or two if you're interested in
computers that you can use while standing up.
It's a 4-pound carryaround computer with a stylus and no keyboard.
Batteries in a pop-in rechargeable pack last for 6-8 hours.
Unfortunately its handwriting recognition sucks eggs. It gets about 9
out of ten characters right on a good day -- uppercase alphabetics and
numerics only. It has a slow slow CPU (8086, 10MHz) and it is really
slow. It wants you to pause between words to give it enough time to
figure out what you wrote. (It will continue tracking your stylus but
it gets confused between the words.) It likes it a lot better if you
write big block letters with lots of space between them.
What it seems to be really designed for is filling out forms. They
have a bunch of software to make it easy to design forms on it, that you
can check boxes, select from menus, and scrawl numbers in. E.g. a
wholesale grocer's order form: a menu of all the stuff they have,
you write in quantities, it adds it to the form and totals it up, etc.
Restaurant menus. Police parking and speeding tickets. Etc.
The screen is LCD and it looks pretty good. There is glass over it to
stiffen it. This creates a small but manageable parallax problem.
The stylus has a brass end with a pretty sharp, but rounded, point.
You can write pretty small with it, but it can't recognize letters
unless they are ten or twenty pixels high. You end up scrawling them
very big -- as long as they only intersect one box, it will figure out
which box to insert the 'translation' into (1.5 seconds after you stop
writing). Then you get to go back and do some simple editing to fix
the things it got wrong. Nothing as usable as proofreaders' marks.
Two clicks (tap tap with the pen) in a text box makes it cover the
bottom half of the screeen with a picture of a keyboard, which is
usually faster to use than the losing character recognition. You can
edit that field with 'keystrokes' and hit OK and it plunks the changed
value back into the form and blows away the keyboard image.
It runs MSDOS and the default bringup gives you a keyboard image on
the bottom half and a scrolling text window on the top half, so you can
do 'real DOS commands' without much pain.
Still, it is worth playing with. They tried. And they may be able to
make money with it while building something more useful. They have the
right physical package for it; it just needs a better CPU, some much
better software, and some portable networking (radio or infrared or
something). Its peripherals are kinda bad too -- $1000 for an
external 20MB disk(!), $500 each for little 512k "ramcards", etc.
Typical Grid.
The one I saw was FCC Class A but he says the production units are Class
B. It looked like it wouldn't survive being dropped in a mudpuddle --
too many slots that opened directly onto circuit boards (e.g. the disk
connection hole). It has a carrying case that would shield it a lot better,
but then you'd have to unzip and untangle it to use it...
--
John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com
Boycott the census! The government that would invade Central America would
not hesitate to break into "their own" census database to violate your privacy.
Maximum penalty for refusing to answer: $100, no jail.fozzard@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Richard Fozzard) (03/01/90)
Though this sort of thing is probably the laptop of the future, it is disappointing to hear how poorly Grid implemented it. Both Go Corp and Momenta are working on such Tablet type of devices, and let's hope they come up with something more usable! rich ======================================================================== Richard Fozzard "Serendipity empowers" Univ of Colorado/CIRES/NOAA R/E/FS 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80303 fozzard@boulder.colorado.edu (303)497-6011 or 444-3168