Re: tlug: palmtop PHS (Toshiba GENIO)

[Craig Oda <craig@example.com>]

On Sun, 7 Dec 1997, J. David Beutel wrote:

> Following up, the PCV100 is a Toshiba GENIO.  It looks a little bit
> like a Pilot, but includes a built-in PHS phone w/ 32kbps (alpha data 32
> and PIAFS?).  It has a 32-bit RISC CPU (MIPS?), Geoworks OS, 1M RAM, 
> 4M memory card (optional?), IrDA 1.0, RS-232-C, 239x160 monochrome display
> with pen input, 12x12 kanji font, PPP, POP3, SMTP, web browser, PDA stuff
> (scheduler, address book, to-do list), and E->J dictionary.
> I saw one in Akihabara (not demonstrated) for 20,000 yen.
> There is an English press release (from February) at

Sounds awesome.  I've never tried it out.  I did spend
several hours combing Shibuya for a pilot though.
The Pilot is probably going to be about 48,000 yen according
to John Little and maybe 20,000 yen for the modem.  So,
this 68,000 yen puts it way above the GENIO.  Without
seeing it, I would like to make a comment on pen input.
I have tried my friend's Zaurus and I own a Casio PDA.
One reason I went for my now-dead Pilot is the graphitti
input system.  If you have never used a PDA, you really
should use the input regularly at the demo center.

If you don't write Japanese that often, you _may_ want to
consider an English based system.  The reason is that
the Kanji is probably stroke-order recognition and the
English ASCII may be too.  Also, how to you input stuff
like @ and double quotes "?   You actually use these more
than you would think when you write in English.  What
about the question mark?  

> Has anyone tried this thing?  My main concern is an early item
> on the FAQ which says that user apps cannot be developed currently.
> So, e.g., no IMAP nor telnet interfaces from a 3rd party.
> But I can't read much of the Japanese, so I'd appreciate any
> pointers to clarification.  I think it hit the streets in September.
> I wonder if there'll be an upgrade for programmability by March?

I have the page loaded in XEmacs20.3 and I'll try to go through it
with edict.el after dinner.  I'm very interested in getting
a new PDA this month, so please feel free to share information
with me.  

This is off-topic but I did notice that Javasoft released
an IMAP package for Java.  I have not tried it out yet,
but there may be PDAs coming out in the future with
embedded Java interfaces.  (pure speculation).  

Gotta go eat.

Regards,
Craig


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