Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 17, 1993 TAG: 9310150085
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Thom Calandra SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Medium
Amstrad PLC's PenPad costs $499 and will be available in this country in two weeks. Although this machine still has some of the same problems of its brethren note pads, like iffy handwriting recognition and hard-to-read screens, it is a standout bargain for the price.
The Essex, England, consumer electronics company has already sold 30,000 of its PenPads in Europe. An Arizona company, Scottsdale Technologies, will distribute the new PenPad in this country.
Personal digital assistants, if you've had your head buried in the sand this past year, are supposed to be technology's proudest addition to the world of expensive toys for traveling executives.
Sadly, Apple's Newton and the rest have had to hurdle a ton of hype that their makers ladled out in heaping globs of advertising copy. In return, the digital assistants, whose prices start at $700, have reaped scathing reviews and sown a new generation of skeptical technology consumers.
Technology newsletters have scribbled on about how electronic note pads' handwriting recognition capabilities are prone to err. Some are too heavy. Or they promise too much memory. Some go through batteries like a bear slobbers through honey.
All of them are too sophisticated for their own good. Classic tale: A technology executive scribbles his digital assistant to death during a tense board meeting, then wrestles furiously with the device as it refuses to convert his penmanship into orderly text. A colleague leans over, hands him a pencil and says, "Bud, try this."
Amstrad's device has solved many headaches by keeping its innards as simple as possible. Instead of the single 32-byte RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) microprocessor that Apple uses in its machine, Amstrad went with three 8-byte chips in its PenPad.
Because of the single Newton chip that controls all functions, Apple's note pad often feels as sophisticated as a personal computer driven by a powerful 486 chip. But the Newton and the similar Sharp Expert Pad, both of them manufactured by Sharp, are often as difficult to figure out as a powerful PC.
The British played it safe. Amstrad's three chips isolate three separate functions. One chip controls character recognition. One runs various applications, such as automatic phone lists and conversion tables for temperatures, volumes, world times and so on. A third chip oversees the machine's use of power. Unlike the Newton, the Amstrad pad conveniently shuts down parts of the system that are not being used.
The big plus is the simplicity of the British machine's character recognition. The Newton and other note pads are taught to recognize specific words. But scribbly handwriting, when it is translated into hard copy, often converts into the wrong words.
Amstrad's product sidesteps the endless pit of word recognition by recognizing individual characters instead. So, when the recognition screws up, you might end up with a typo - but not an entirely different word.
"This machine has no preconceived notions. You train it; it doesn't train you," said Gary Gear, Scottsdale Technologies' director of technology.
Like the other machines, the Amstrad pad uses basic artificial intelligence to fine-tune the way it recognizes its user's quirks of penmanship. Like its competitors, the Amstrad PenPad comes with the pocket organizer functions that are the most utilitarian features of all note pads. You get a calculator, alarm clock, calendar, automatic phone list and address book all rolled into one.
Other positives: Three alkaline batteries last 40 hours, or about three weeks of vigorous use. This is much longer than the other machines. The Amstrad PenPad has a very respectable 128k of usable memory. The Newton promises 256k, but Gear says he has yet to see any Newton with more than 128k. A cover protects the pad from getting punctured in briefcases. A crib sheet on the cover makes it nearly moron-proof to use the machine's diary, address pad and other functions. The PenPad weighs only 14 ounces with batteries - slightly less than its competitors.
"This is a good technology," Gear said. "It doesn't try to leap ahead. I'm not criticizing Apple, but they have a very complex machine. Ours is the kind of machine that you won't get embarrassed using at a board meeting."
by CNB