The most recent articles from PC Magazine

Handspring Treo 180

Cliff Joseph — 2002-05-16T15:06:45.000Z

Cliff Joseph, PC Magazine, Thursday 16 May 2002 at 15:06:45

Handspring enters the communicator market.

Handspring has carved out a nice little niche in the PDA market with its Visor range, and it's now attempting to make the leap into what it calls the 'communicator' market with the Treo 180.

The Treo 180 combines the features of a standard Palm OS organiser with a dual-band GSM mobile phone and wireless internet access, yet somehow Handspring's designers have managed to make it smaller than any of its existing Visor models. It measures just 11 by 6.9 by 1.8cm, but is solidly built and comfortable to hold.

There are two versions currently available, one with a full - but rather small - QWERTY keyboard, and another that retains the touch-sensitive Graffiti writing pad used by most Palm OS devices. There are also plans for a colour version, although this isn't likely to appear until mid-year.

In addition to all of the usual calendar, address book and to-do lists, the Treo features speed-dial software, an on-screen dial pad and SMS messaging capabilities. Handspring also includes a web browser called Blazer, which does a good job of reformatting web pages for the device's small screen.

The Treo will primarily be available via BT-offshoot mmO2 in the UK for a fairly reasonable £249.99 (ex VAT). You can buy it without a contract and use an existing SIM card from another operator, but that will add about £200 to the price.

Price

£249.99 with contract

Contact

Handspring: 020 7309 0134

www.handspring.co.uk

NEC PocketGear

Matthew Moore — 2002-05-10T11:37:51.000Z

Matthew Moore, PC Magazine, Friday 10 May 2002 at 11:37:51

Very similar to other Pocket PC devices, but with a lower spec.

The NEC PocketGear is a robust unit thanks to its aluminium case. It's an attractively designed product with some useful extra applications and could particularly appeal to those with a requirement for good audio capabilities.

However, its main drawback is that its 206MHz StrongARM SA-1100 processor is backed by just 32MB of RAM.

The casing houses some useful features, including a headphone jack and a speaker that's situated at the centre of the four-way paddle control.

You can expand the device via the Type II CompactFlash slot at the top, which has a small window that allows you to see whether or not a card is inserted. There's also an SD Card slot at the side.

The protective screen attaches by means of two plastic lugs, although one of these broke during our review. You can also attach the PocketGear to a carry strap.

To make it more suitable for use as a digital dictaphone, there's an automatic gain control provided as one of the utilities supplied by NEC. This sets the recording level for the microphone located in the top of the device.

The other programs include an illumination level control that gives five brightness levels, an Asset Viewer that gives such details as ROM date and version, FlashROM size and model, as well as a device ID. You can toggle between the Fast IR (4Mbit/s) and Slow IR (115.2Kbit/s) modes, as well as set wake-up events and choose to auto-run the CompactFlash, SD Card and PC Card services on startup.

NEC has also written software to allow you to set the colour of the indicator LED for device events such as USB synchronisation and Wake on Ring. In terms of standard Microsoft applications, you'll find MSN Messenger in addition to the standard Pocket PC 2002 package.

Similar to Casio and Toshiba devices, the PocketGear offers both CompactFlash II and SD compatibility. Otherwise it's very similar to other Pocket PC devices. Additional hardware controls include a jog wheel you can press in to select a function, and a quick launch button to launch the Notes application, into which you can input either text or audio notes.

The PocketGear's upgrade capabilities mean you don't have to worry about compatibility, although its memory size doesn't make it suitable for power users.

Contact

NEC: 1 Simpson Parkway, Livingston, Scotland EH54 7BH

Tel 0870 010 6329, Fax 01506 402521

www.nec-online.co.uk

Compaq iPaq H3880

PC Magazine staff — 2002-05-02T13:43:53.000Z

PC Magazine staff, PC Magazine, Thursday 2 May 2002 at 13:43:53

A sturdy device that's well suited to corporate use.

Compaq's pocket PCs have been consistently impressive both in hardware and software terms, and the latest iPaq H3880 is no exception.

Like its predecessors, it's small (8.3 by 1.6 by 13.46cm) and light (190g). It uses a 206MHz StrongARM SA1110 processor backed by 64Mb of Ram, although we didn't find it particularly responsive during menu and program selection.

The iPaq is the first pocket PC we've seen to support Bluetooth. As well as an integrated Bluetooth transceiver, it's supplied with Manager software to allow the device to work with Bluetooth hosts for cable free data exchange and synchronisation.

Also supplied is Virtual Game Gear emulator, which lets you play games similar to the way in which they appeared on Sega's handheld console. An asset viewer shows an at-a-glance readout of the device's capabilities.

You can also get details of any external battery used, choose to enable or disable auto-run and control the back light on the excellent 16-bit colour transflective TFT screen, which is highly visible indoor and out.

The Compaq Audio control less you set the bass and treble control for the integrated headphone socket when listening to MP3 or WMA files using Windows Media Player 8, as well as turn the automatic microphone gain on or off.

If you're experiencing problems with the iPaq, you can run the self-test utility which lets you test correct functioning of sound, screen calibration, LED notification and ROM checksum.

Usefully, you can choose to send your contacts and appointments databases to non-volatile memory to prevent erasure if your device loses power. An applet allows you to change the memory usage from the device defaults, plus there's a clock application.

Hardware control is a little limited as there's no jog dial, but there's an SD Card expansion slot and you can use optional packs that support PC Cards and CompactFlash cards.

There's an integrated microphone and speaker, as well as a quick-launch button for the Notes utility.

As an alternative to synchronising over Bluetooth, you can also use the supplied USB cradle, which will drain the 1,400mAh battery more slowly than the wireless method.

Contact: Compaq 0845 270 4222

www.compaq.co.uk/products/ipaq/pocketpc/

Toshiba e570

PC Magazine staff — 2002-04-12T14:08:13.000Z

PC Magazine staff, PC Magazine, Friday 12 April 2002 at 14:08:13

One of the less impressive Pocket PC solutions available.

Toshiba's e570 is one of the less impressive Pocket PC solutions available. It features a rather small screen that measures just 9.2cm diagonally, although it does display 240 by 320 pixels and supports 16-bit colour.

It's light, weighing just 180g including the Li-ion rechargeable battery, but its construction is a little unreassuring and it's rather difficult to fit in to the supplied USB synchronisation cradle.

The Toshiba uses a 206MHz StrongARM CPU and is backed by 64MB of memory.

The e570 lacks many extra hardware features, but there's a 3.5mm headphone socket at the top of the device for use with Windows Media Player 8. There's no jog wheel, but you can launch Notes easily thanks to the hardware button just above the microphone.

Audio playback is possible, thanks to a speaker on the front of the device, while an infrared port allows for data exchange with other PDAs.

The standard four application launch buttons are situated on the front of the device. However, we found the four-way paddle a little small and lacking in a positive action.

Like NEC's PocketGear, the e570 hosts both a Type II CompactFlash slot and an SD Card slot for device expansion. The SD Card slot is always exposed, but the CompactFlash card is protected by a hinged flap.

Toshiba provides some extra software, although it's not as comprehensive as the Compaq and HP offerings. You get a copy of driving game V-Rally and a version of the London Underground map from Visual IT.

Instead of a hard cover, the e570 comes with a soft plastic case which doesn't offer particularly good protection for the screen. Unusually, the cradle and power supply aren't integrated, so you can recharge the Toshiba e570 without having to place it in the synchronisation cradle.

There's nothing that distinguishes the e570. It's a serviceable, basic and relatively inexpensive PDA, but you might find its lack of features a drawback.

Contact

Toshiba: Toshiba Court, Weybridge Business Park, Addlestone Road, Weybridge, Surrey KT15 2UL. Tel 01932 828828, Fax 01932 822952

www.csd.toshiba.com/pda/pda_home.html

Windows moves to phones

Maggie Williams — 2002-03-12T14:57:26.000Z

Maggie Williams, PC Magazine, Tuesday 12 March 2002 at 14:57:26

Microsoft and Texas Instruments meet comms challenge

Microsoft and Texas Instruments (TI) have announced the Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 reference design, giving handset manufacturers a blueprint to quickly produce new GPRS models. Phones based on the design, formerly codenamed Stinger, will offer access to personal data, wireless email and the Web, according to Microsoft.

The unveiling of Smartphone 2002 at the 3GSM communications conference in Cannes coincided with the launch of Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition. This adds wireless voice and data capabilities to Microsoft's handheld platform.

Ed Suwanjindar, product manager for Microsoft's mobility group, said TI's wireless chipsets are key to the product's success.

"We need devices that can do more, in both personal productivity and communication. The challenge has been to do this with a small footprint," he said. Putting an applications processor and radio on a single die was also a challenge, he added.

Products based on the reference design should appear in Europe within months.

TI's TCS2500 chipset is based on the firm's Omap architecture. It incorporates a GSM/GPRS engine and an ARM-compatible applications processor on the same chip.

Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition and Smartphone 2002 are based on Windows CE 3.0, rather than the newer CE.Net version announced in January. Suwanjindar said a CE.Net version of the software will appear "when schedules allow".

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard said it will release a handheld based on Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition. The Jornada 928 WDA (Wireless Digital Assistant) is also based on TI's Omap chips and will have GSM and GPRS capabilities when it ships this summer.

Juergen Anthoni, HP's wireless marketing manager for Europe, sees the device as a PDA with wireless capabilities rather than a smartphone. "It's a recognition of the fact that mobile data will become more important on devices like this," he said.

Both Microsoft and TI are taking a broad approach to smartphones and are involved in initiatives beyond this joint reference design. Microsoft is collaborating with Intel to create a second smartphone design based on Intel's Personal Internet Client Architecture (PCA) and XScale chips.

TI is working on other smartphone designs. Kada Systems will use a different TI Omap chipset for GPRS phones, and Sun Microsystems is collaborating with TI on chipsets to support Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME) on mobile clients.

www.microsoft.com/mobile

Standard judgement

Guy Kewney — 2002-03-04T10:05:20.000Z

Guy Kewney, PC Magazine, Monday 4 March 2002 at 10:05:20

This time next year, most notebooks will be sold with not just Wi-Fi built in, but also dual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

You're buying a notebook PC, but aren't sure whether to ask for one with Bluetooth, built-in GSM or Wi-Fi. Almost certainly, you're worrying about bandwidth.

Bandwidth is a context. Take backup, for example. Backing up the data on a notebook PC with a 20GB hard disk takes time. If the only connection available is an ISDN line, you probably wouldn't do it.

You'd save some spreadsheets and documents, perhaps, but judging by the way most notebook users complain when their hard disks crash, even those connected to a 100Mbit/s Ethernet cable seem to find the chore of backing up too hard. But 20GB at 128Kbit/s? Never. It's definitely a bandwidth problem. You'd solve the backup issue a different way.

So it's easy to see why network administrators aren't interested in Bluetooth links for PCs. At the maximum Bluetooth is specified for around 1Mbit/s.

Anybody with any experience of wireless connections will tell you the actual data payload is never going to reach that speed - you'll see 600Kbit/s at best in terms of actual data, shifted from one place to another. And if there's radio interference, it'll drop further.

In fact, since the discovery that Bluetooth does, indeed, interfere with wireless LANs using the 802.11b standard, it has to be accepted that it will give you 128Kbit/s, reliably. That's roughly home ISDN speed.

But 128Kbit/s is plenty for someone playing MP3 music. It's fine for sending and receiving emails. It's even acceptable for Web surfing. Actually, these days very few host sites will feed the data to you faster - whatever your connection speed.

Now, suppose that you're sitting on a train with your notebook PC and you need to check your office diary. Next to you is a perfectly ordinary mobile phone with an infrared link to your PC. You dial-in and after spending most of a minute waiting while the two ends chat to each other about training and protocols, you look at the entries for the day. This can all be done in less than another minute - with a 28Kbit/s connection, at best.

Here, the issue isn't bandwidth, but response time. The delay while the diary data comes down the line is invisible; it's the tedious time that it takes the two ends to negotiate a connection that rankles.

By the same token, a PC on a WLAN at 11Mbit/s is still too slow for most people to attempt a full backup of the data. The result is that when people discuss bandwidth issues, they're mostly discussing things that don't matter.

For example, my backup is constantly up to date. I write my text onto a hard disk, but when it's saved, the data is replicated exactly onto a remote Web server. Since I can't write more than a few kilobytes of original text at a time, the data is never held up by bandwidth - even at 9.6Kbits/s over a standard GSM phone link, I can back up the data as I produce it. I can also retrieve the data from anywhere in the world - as long as I know the URL of my backup server.

This time next year, most notebooks will be sold with not just Wi-Fi built in, but also dual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Even infrared is making a comeback, as people come to understand it's sometimes an appropriate solution.

The new 50Mbit/s Wi-Fi5 standard will almost certainly be included in high-end systems as well. Intel has already demonstrated 802.11a alongside 802.11b in the UK and it's selling 802.11a systems in the US now.

Anyone who wants to know which standard to go with is missing the point. What's far more important is to know how to manage a corporate network so that users of all systems have the appropriate support.

* * * * * *

Even to my inexpert eye, the flat-screen display on my colleague's desk was something special. Big, clear and responsive, it had that unmistakable 'you can't afford this' look to it.

It was Eizo's latest FlexScan L685, which is, unmistakeably, a top-of-the-line display. I asked him what it cost. "Ooh, this is the expensive one," he said. "How much?" We took bets.

He thought it was around the £3,000 mark; I thought it might be under £2,000. We checked with Eizo and found it was £1,109 (ex VAT).

When flat-screen displays first appeared, they were all unaffordable. These days, anybody with a cramped office will probably go for a smallish flat-screen display, rather than a larger CRT box, even if they feel they'd prefer a larger screen area, better colour balance or a faster response screen.

But when it comes to big displays, we feel that the colour LCD is simply going to be out of reach.

I think this display marks the point where the makers of cathode ray tubes have to stop and ask: "Do I want to stay in this business if it stops being a mass market?"

There is a demand, for sure, for CRT televisions. But, increasingly, it's become a widescreen market. Widescreen CRT isn't something that computer display technology uses comfortably. To put it politely, there are 'driver issues', which can be fixed, but why would you? A widescreen CRT is an expensive display, but you could get the same format, if you wanted, on a smaller LCD.

The world itself is widescreen. If you stand outside and look around, most of what you want to look at is on the horizon - the wider your vision, the better. But the world of data is actually more vertical. We use panoramic displays on computers because that's what the CRT makers were making for TV when we started using PCs 30 years ago. We've adapted to this, but the fact is that for editing text, a portrait-oriented display is far more usable.

Again, there are driver issues, but the one thing you really can do with a flat-screen display is have a dual-standard. Anybody who remembers the old pivot-rotating CRT will know that a huge glass box of vacuum is unwieldy and that if you have the thing set in one orientation, it's impossible to switch. Apart from anything else, people put toys on top of their CRTs.

If you ran into a driver issue when playing with a vertical-oriented display, it was a right royal pain to switch. But with a flat-screen display, it's just a moment's exasperation and a rotate and carry on.

It's too soon to say that portrait-oriented displays will be with us next year and it's probably too soon to say that the CRT is dead for PCs. But my money will be on the majority of mid-range PCs being bought with flat screens within two years - and possibly within 12 months.

* * * * * *

When the BBC found it was able to buy electronic broadcast devices on the open market, rather than having to design them from basic research up to production, it did its best to keep its famous R&D department going in the old manner for as long as possible. In the end, however, the operation was heavily scaled down. After all, why do original research on transmitter technology just to see commercial organisations make the profits?

In a very similar way, the technology used to switch phone calls and internet traffic is no longer something a telco can manufacture for itself - or even specify. A mass-market box costs a fraction of a purpose-built one and British Telecom has had to face this fact. It too has a huge, resourceful and highly reputed R&D establishment, but also a serious problem: what to do to justify keeping the Martlesham Heath researchers together.

In some ways, the problem isn't going to go away. In others, the BT Adastral Park site (the new name) has a future where the BBC's research arm didn't: it not only owns 18,000-odd patents, but it has the money to turn them into businesses. And that's what it's now doing.

Of course, the majority of the national press comment about BT focuses on its huge debt. Indeed, this isn't fantasy; it does have huge debts and is struggling to pay them off out of its income. But there's a proportion issue to consider. The income might be small compared to the debts, but the amount of money needed to turn a few basic BT patents into a business is trivial compared to BT's income. And the potential rewards are absolutely huge - many of the patents are aimed at the IT business, not just at the telecoms industry.

On a recent trip to Adastral Park, I saw some fascinating - and apparently original - research into subjects like parasitic networks, where you do away with the need for fixed 'cells' to support mobile phones by setting up ad hoc mesh networks where individual devices instantly forward data to the nearest individual in the right direction.

I also saw a pure IT proposal turning into a business, APSolve, which is nothing more than a commercial exploitation of the software BT uses to direct its 22,000 vans to the 150,000 tasks they do each day.

There was also the Gabrielle voice portal, which is the clever systems integration of voice control with mouse control for Web portal access from a variety of information appliances. The basic technology is clever, but it's simple systems integration discipline that turns this into something to attract venture funding.

I suspect that most of these startups will fail. Out of every 50 ideas, BT Brightstar - the funder of the R&D spinoff project - reckons only one will become a business. And of those, one in four might become a corporation that can play globally with a market capitalisation of £50m and a long-term future.

It sounds like carnage, but in fact, with BT now funding over a dozen new companies a year, this could mean three new corporate technology-based giants rolling out of Suffolk every year in a very few years' time. I like to see centres of excellence and I like to see them succeed. I'm very much in favour of wishing the Martlesham experiment well.

* * * * * *

I've been watching a lot of video on my notebook PC recently. Things like video chat, conferencing and Bloomberg TV. It's changed my requirements for processor design.

A year ago, a 'portable' PC would typically spend most of its time on the same desk. Today, that's just not acceptable; it has to be lightweight enough for you to carry around. Today we want smaller batteries and clever power-saving tricks. Unfortunately, though, these new applications mean that cache can't help us save power.

For someone who's just typing or making notes, cache algorithms can switch the disk off, slow the processor down to a trickle and turn a two-hour battery life into four hours - especially if you can switch off the backlight.

But increasingly, people want to watch streams of multimedia. And the research effort is going into bandwidth optimisation. However, bandwidth isn't the problem. The problem is that even small video streams - like the sort you get from conferencing - require quite a processor load for compression and decompression, as well as a lot of disk buffering. Buffering isn't the same as cacheing when you're dealing with real-time data.

If I want to watch a pre-recorded video stream, I can (in theory) download the load on a super-fast link, then play it back later from local storage, freeing the link. But I'm still grinding on with the hard disk and processor.

Intel has solved its speed problem with the Pentium 4. What I want to see in 2002 is some sign that it understands the power consumption problem.