Peter's Blog

I've been trying out various alternative methods of text entry on my pocketpc. Each different entry method is implemented by a SIP (Soft Input Panel) and Windows Mobile 5 comes with four SIPs built in:

Block Recognizer

a bit like palm's graffiti. Requires remembering odd letter strokes and neat writing.

Keyboard

tiny keyboard to peck text out on. Will suggest a list of words, given enough letters to work with so you can choose a word from the list.

Letter Recognizer

recognises less formally written letters than Block Recognizer. This one reminded me most of my palm tungsten T2.

Transcriber

supposedly handwriting recognition but not accurate enough to be useful.

The third party things I have tried are:

Tengo

this one works like predictive text on a phone but with just six buttons. It's kind of fun, the keys are large and you can type quite fast but it is very error prone, frequently choosing the wrong word and going back to correct errors is quite fiddly. I am getting tired of it's mistakes. Like a phone you can re-select a word and chose a different completion but it has an annoying bug where it adds an extra space after the word which my perfectionism cannot ignore.

Calligrapher

supposedly better handwriting recognition but not good enough to be useful. This is mainly my fault for having poor handwriting (these days I only use it to write my signature).

Fitaly

a weird, supposedly efficient keyboard layout to learn, tied with a list of word suggestions. This was ok but the word suggestions weren't much better than those provided by the pocketpc keyboard, still have to type four or five letters to get any suggestions.

WordLogic

another mini qwerty keyboard but with a more sophisticated word suggestion mechanism, often it is only necessary to type the first three letters of a word. When I try to add a new word to WordLogic it seems to crash it and I have to reopen the SIP.

Tengo is most fun but the error rate is bad. WordLogic is my next preference, I make fewer errors but it feels like a slow way of writing. I think this is because the keyboard is too small, most errors seem to be due to tapping the wrong letter.

Conclusion: no clear winner. Letter Recogniser is the best of the built in ones, it is probably faster than WordLogic. I do have a soft spot for tengo though.

Bought myself a new PDA, an HP Ipaq rx1950 Pocketpc. It was a bit of an impulse buy, a bit of retail therapy I felt in need of a few weeks back. The model I bought was essentially the cheapest I could get locally that had integrated wifi.

I used to use a palm tungsten T2 but it's digitiser does not work properly, it takes about five goes to get past the initial calibration and it's downhill from there. I still had a hankering for a pda, a portable notetaking device to serve as a backup for my failing memory.

Following my experiences with the palm and bluetooth I decided that wifi was pretty much essential, bluetooth was slow and the bluetooth stacks in windows complex and buggy.

The rx1950 runs Windows Mobile 2005, the latest name for Windows CE/pocketpc. It is a stylus driven thing, not my first preference but keyboard models are more expensive and have smaller screens.

Bullet point review:

• first impression when I took it out the box was how light it is, much lighter than my old palm. It's fairly thin as well, maybe half an inch thick. It would fit better in a trouser pocket if not for the carry case that comes with it which is almost as thick again.
• nice solid build quality: HP after all.
• stylus has a tendency to fall out: I put it in the carrying case the wrong way round to restrain it or I would certainly lose it.
• no charging cradle: comes with a USB cable and a mains adapter that plugs into the USB cable: rather awkward and fiddly and annoying that it cannot charge from the USB port. There are aftermarket USB cables available that will charge it.
• synchronises with the pc using activesync and I was amazed to discover that it won't sync over the wifi. Apparently microsoft decided it was a security hole and they couldn't think of a way to plug it so they just removed the feature. This leaves USB or infra-red so I'm using USB when I feel the need. Many pocketpc apps are available as cab files that can be downloaded directly to the device over the wifi and installed. Some producers are not enlightened to this and ship apps with windows installers that use activesync and hence can only be installed at home base.
• the device has 32M of 'program memory' for running programs data and this isn't really enough. The symptoms of this seem to be the o/s terminating apps that are not in the foreground. If you have, say, windows media player playing something then you can only run maybe one more program before something gets randomly zapped. Microsoft have tried to create a paradigm where you don't have separate applications but flip between different modes without worrying about having to close apps down. Apps are closed automatically by the OS as memory runs low and should be designed to save their state such that when they are reopened they are in the same state as when they were shut down. Unfortunately it looks like developers use standard development techniques and applications being suddenly terminated by the OS leaves the user high and dry.
• it has another 32M for storing programs but I bought a 1G SD card and I put everything in that.
• the screen is just about big enough. It is ok for reading without scrolling too much. For most web browsing it is awful unless I use http://skweezercom or google mobile to strip out any fancy stuff.
• the character recognisers that come with it are not much good: the handwriting recognition (transcriber) is slow and inaccurate. I am using something called Tengo which is a bit like predictive text on a phone so involves hitting only six big buttons. It has some clever design features and there is something about it that is kinda fun. I am writing this review with it so you may spot predictive-text style wrong word errors.
• a frequently used feature is the reset button: windows mobile is a typical windows o/s and isn't sophisticated enough to offer robust task management. Applications can lock it hard and banging on an unresponsive plastic screen is particularly fruitless.
• it has speaker and microphone. The speaker is just about loud enough to listen to podcasts. I haven't tried skype on it, the skype site doesn't list the rx1950 as supported and the cpu may not be fast enough.
• has 3.5mm audio jack and the sound to my ears was pretty good. It is a good mp3 player.
• battery life is very good, one charge gives a good day of use.

As a device for browsing rss feeds while watching tv, taking notes, listening to music, watching videos or whatever it is just fine. It is more convenient than a laptop and I can carry it in my pocket so is far more mobile. I can see that it is a quirky platform and will probably have been killed off by mobile phones and mp3 players within two years time.

I'll write about the applications I have installed in it some other time.

I am going to experiment with a new note taking device I bought in Tesco. It is hand held and uses a pen-type input device which I had to buy as an extra. It's search facilities are poor but it has good handwriting recognition, everything I enter is immediately recognised and the are no problems entering cursive script (unlike the palm where you have to enter o n e l e t t e r a t a t i m e) and it doesn't need recharging. It cost me about £2.50 in total. It is an A6 paper notebook and a propelling pencil. The plan is to take notes and transcribe them into the computer later.

Tempted by Dell Axim X50, a PocketPC, which Dell are selling for £234 which seems like good deal for something with:

• Wifi (only b but that will do)
• Bluetooth
• 64M ram
• 128M flash
• Compactflash and SD slots: can share compactflash with my camera and they do a 1G card for £41.36 which is a good deal
• Free TV Tuner (!). Just have to walk around carrying a UHF aerial.
• Powerful IR emitter, useable as remote control.
• It works with Skype which means free phone calls from starbucks.

I haven't been using my Tungsten T2 recently. Reasons:

• My digitiser is flaky and I have to be pixel perfect clicking on things. The handwriting recognition is pretty poor, have to write ultra-big block capitals all the time which always seems like hard work.
• No Wifi Bluetooth is no comparison.
• Palm OS is pretty noddy compared to windows: it does have 'files' as such just databases which makes it hard to port anything to it.
• Appears to be a dying platform: Palm are being sluggish with their Wifi and this could be a fatal error.
• Sony are already pulling the plug on their Palm PDA's to focus on phones.

Last time I looked at the Palm T2 the battery was flat so I put it on charge. Turned it on this morning to find out time of an appointment and the thing was totally reset, back to initial settings.

It was my first opportunity to try out BackupBuddyVFS Restore and it has worked perfectly. Thumbs up for that. It may be that the auto-backups at 5pm everyday are what flattened the battery but it has made up for it.

The digitiser on my palm is definitely flaky. The initial calibrate thing asks me to tap on the centre of three crosses and I have to do this many times before it will accept the calibration. It is very fussy about precisely where I tap on the screen. For examplem if I want to click on a button, sometimes I have to tap just above the button to get a hit.

I feel the need for a status report on various stuff I've mentioned in this blog.

Palm Tungsten T2

I haven't used this so much recently, I only use it as a diary. This is partly because it is summer and I don't wear a coat with pockets to carry it around. It's too big for trouser pockets. I do my blogging with Python Desktop Server, I don't use DayNotez any more.

Dell Inspiron 500m

I love my notebook, I'm using it now, I'd say it was my primary PC. I sit on the sofa in front of the TV and go through RSS feeds. My main gripe with it is that sometimes when it comes out of hibernate it does not see the wireless network and I have to hibernate it and unhibernate it again to kick it into life. Oh, also the SVideo output is only black and white. The laptop is just nice, no noisy fans and it doesn't make my lap overheat. About 2 hours of battery life.

Desktop PC

Hasn't crashed recently but that may be because I don't use it very often. The only time I used it this week was as a print server. The drivers with the PC TV card might have fixed the PCI latency issues. There are a number of PCs at work, including the firewall PC, that use VIA chipsets and they randomly hang as well. I have no love for VIA.

Python Desktop Server

Use it most days. I use it at work for my engineering logs which are behind a firewall. I haven't got around to adding tools or anything, I mainly use it for RSS aggregation. Having the aggregation in the web browser makes it so convenient for following links: in firefox I middle-click and read in a new tab. As a blogging tool my main gripe is the lack of a preview facility: checking links and formatting before uploading. I have to set it to offline mode before I start composing.

Debian

My debian server is still whirring away (noisy fans this summer but it's in a room I don't go in much). It handles email and Python Desktop Server and is also useful as a squid proxy that I can access from work through an SSH tunnel. I can use this to check the work firewall, to make sure it is possible to get in through the firewall. I might change server to a desktop pc as the laptop is a bit slow (166MHz pentium). That would allow me to make it a headless X server.

Object Desktop

I got fed up with animated fish using my CPU time in DesktopX. I use windowsblinds on the laptop to make it a bit more interesting but I don't think it was worth buying.

Intellimail

Still using it at home but I am tempted to move to IMAP + thunderbird like I use at work. Awaiting a home server decision.

Thunderbird

It's ok if a bit utilitarian when compared to Intellimail. However it handles IMAP, if a little flakily (it sometimes displays Inbox(3) but doesn't show the new messages).

Firefox

Love it. I only use IE for broken websites.

ITunes

May register for it today. If I can buy just the tracks I want and blow them to an audio CD then I see no need to buy CD's that are 75% filler material.

Furl

I'm beginning to see Furl as a place to look for websites that other people find interesting. When I run out of RSS articles I now try, e.g. this.

Motorbike

Sold for the asking price to a dealer who was advertising for CBR600's.

This article talks about mobile blogging using a Newton. Up till now I've been using Natara DayNotez as a blogging tool on a Palm Tungsten T2. I use a Python script to read the blog entries from the database and build a static log site here. My plan is to migrate my old blog entries to Python Desktop Server using its MetaWeblogAPI. I still want to blog on the palm, it passes the time in Starbucks.

Set Palm up so record button opens BigClock. Pressing and holding the select button brings up the World Clock app but the delay is annoying.

Downloaded a star trek theme for BigClock to make palm look more like a tricorder. Needs some flashing leds.

For palm buttons, I now have:

Button 1

Zlauncher

Button 2

DateBk5

Button 3

DayNotez

Button 4

Zlauncher Quicklaunch

Record

BigClock

Downloaded SciCalc scientific calculator for**palm**. Looks like a real calculator (remember them?) and does hex plus some useful conversions. Quirks:

• hex range is only up to 7FFFFFFF. Add 1 and get overrange

• have to tap on base display to open menu

Got a message on my palm to say it had put the clock forward an did I want reminding. I said no and it cleared the thing that has been flashing for two days.