CompuServe Messages

Boo Magic!! Boo, boo!! My personal bias is that I want a PDA that's always with me. Period. For this to be the case, the PDA has to fit into my pocket. The Magiclink (at least the Sony implementation) is only slightly smaller than a subnotebook, and 1/4 as useful. If I wanted to carry something around with me, I'd carry my Thinkpad and use all my normal apps. Magic is in a really uncomfortable middle ground for me. Of course, if you carry a small backpack with you normally, this may not be a big issue for me. However, I have to admit that my old Wizard with pen input, and now my Newton, have pushed my entire warddrobe towards Dockers, so that I have pockets big enough to hold my PDA. 🙂 You should take another look at the Newton or the Zoomer, if your problem with them was handwriting recognition. There's a new recognizer called Graffitti that gives me 30 words a minute at 100% recognition. It's amazing. You have to learn a slightly stylized alphabet to get it to work. When I originally heard this, I was completely uninterested in the product. I didn't want to learn shorthand to write to my Newton. I downloaded the tutorial for fun, however, and played around with it for about 15 minutes, and was suddenly writing relatively effortlessly with 100% recognition. My jaw dropped, I picked up the phone, and immediately ordered my copy. "Don't worry, as soon as Windows for PDAs comes out, you'll be the forward thinker <g>." If you were on the Chicago beta, you would have seen our first Windows PDA app, called Winpad. Of course, if you had seen it, you'll notice that it won't be in the next beta release. PC Week reports that we couldn't make it work for under a 1000 dollars and have acceptable performance, so we yanked it back to stew on it for a while. It looks like the Newton doesn't have to worry about us showing up for a while! -R Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee, and the views expressed here are my own. The information presented on Winpad is public knowledge that was written about in PC Week, although it must be pointed out that they have no special source of information either, and if I knew extra or contradictory information, I would still quote the public knowledge anyway.