Re: Zaurus

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "C" == C Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    C> On Mon, 26 Aug 1996, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> Basically, I've found Wnn/Canna + my Zaurus to be equal to
    >> almost all my needs, and never got around to customizing that
    >> portion of my system.

    C> Steve, I was thinking of buying the Zaurus PI-6000 or the
    C> PI-7000.  Does it work well with your daily routine?

I've got the PI-5000 with the add-on fax/modem.  I don't use the fax
or the data modem very much, so I can't tell you much about them.  I
just don't spend enough time away from my office and/or laptop.

Please note that any of the following comments should be read in the
spirit that drastic improvements have probably been made in many of
the functions.

The Zaurus itself, on the other hand, is essential to my daily life
now.  There are 4 dictionaries (ei-wa, wa-ei, kokugo, and kanji) and
they are fairly well integrated by a recursive lookup feature.
They're at a high school/entering college level.  The handwriting
recognition is excellent if you know stroke order; this makes looking
up many complicated kanji 1--2 orders of magnitude faster than any
other method.  This alone made it worth the price; it was 45000 yen
when I bought it (plus another 7000 for the fax/modem option), and a
comparable Canon Word Tank without handwriting recognition was over
30000 yen.

The "report" function is moderately helpful, although data entry is
slow (since you either have to point at a keyboard or fight the
handwriting recognition).  The "report" formats are not terribly
useful, in general; I mostly use freeform memos.  The "tegaki-memo"
feature is nice for taking a few quick notes, or drawing small maps.

The calculator is pretty low-grade; the clock has several nice
features, including a dual display (local time and one other time
zone) and menu selection of the time zone.  Alarms can be set either
in the clock (one "daily alarm") or in the calendar/scheduler.  The
calendar/scheduler is quite good.  Besides the usual features
including alarms, it provides a number of ways of setting recurrent
events like birthdays and weekly meetings.  There is also a moderately
useful "action planner" (a To-do list which is partially integrated
with the scheduler).

The denwa-cho is good, but simple.  My main complaint is that it puts
all romaji tags in the same name space, while each of the major kana
groups gets its own (a-ka-sa...).  The meishi-manager was a new
feature in the PI-5000.  A good idea but not ready for prime time.  It 
adds some nice relational features, but isn't very flexible.  For
example I would like to group all my utility contacts (NTT, ITJ,
call-back, TEPCo, etc) as one "company," but it insists that each
company should have a single address.  (Or something like that, I
forget exactly what it wouldn't do.)  The meishi manager should be a
replacement for the denwa-cho, but it isn't.

The "ink-wapuro" feature is a good idea that is as yet useless
(allowing cut-and-paste operations on blocks of handwritten text and
some block operations are controlled by gestures rather than menu
selections), if you do much writing in English.  It compresses
handwritten text to a standard vertical scale.  This is fine for
kanji, but it means that English characters with ascenders and
descenders tend to become unreadably small.  You aren't allowed to
break up blocks of handwritten text; this makes line-breaking
problematical.  Even doing things like copy-and-paste aren't any
advantage, since you can also do these operations on tegaki-memos.

I would recommend getting one of the data transfer features (which I
don't have); there is a simple current loop port (which might be
compatible with RS-232 serial ports, but I've heard conflicting
reports on that) and an infrared port for my model.  I find it a real
pain in the butt on occasion not to be able to move stuff back and
forth.  Those occasions are moderately rare, and always occur the day
*after* I return from Tokyo, so I never get around to going to
Akihabara and remedying the deficiency.  :-P  I could use the modem, of
course, but....

So there's a summary of what I like about it.  I'm seriously
considering investing in a PI-6/7000 and bequeathing the PI-5000 to my 
wife.  I'm sure that a lot of my problems with the PI-5000 have been
fixed in the versions.

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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