HandEra 33016 July 2001 The first time I saw the specs for the HandEra 330, I thought it looked like the perfect writer's PDA. QVGA screen. Compact Flash and Secure Digital card slots. Rechargeable Lithium battery pack or four AAAs. AC adapter. Virtual, dismissible Graffiti area. Uses the same cases, styli, keyboards and other accessories as the Palm III series. And all of this from the company formerly known as TRG Products, whose TRGpro and AutoCF program still set the standard for seamless PalmOS card expansion. Well, I finally got my hands on one of these babies, and I've spent the past couple of weeks putting it through its paces. How does it measure up for the mobile writer? Well, as with anything, there's good stuff, and not so good stuff. Good stuffWe'll start with the good stuff, and there's lots of it. The first thing you'll notice about the HandEra 330 is how crisp the screen looks. Even though the device looks at first glance like a PalmIIIxe trying to do an iPaq impression, once you turn it on the screen just looks so much sharper than what you'd expect from a Palm. This is because standard Palm applications--those not rewritten to take advantage of the HandEra's screen--still have 50% more pixels to play with, 240 across instead of the standard Palm 160. The HandEra will stretch bitmap graphics by default, draw vector graphics, like buttons, to screen coordinates 150% their normal size, and replace fonts with sharper fonts 50% bigger. The result is that text-based applications look much sharper than they do on a normal Palm, although bitmap graphics like icons do look "chunky" or "muddy" because of the stretching. While you're looking at the screen, you may notice the virtual Graffiti area. Unlike every other PalmOS device on the market, the HandEra 330 lacks a physical, silk-screened Graffiti area. Instead, it draws the Graffiti area on the lower 240x80 pixel part of the screen, and lets you dismiss it when you don't need data input. Since the Graffiti area is drawn in sofware, HandEra has other tricks for it as well that normal Palms can't do. If you assign an application other than the calculator to the Calculator button, the icon for that program shows up in that space. I've seen a hack that will display time, date, memory and battery information inside the Graffiti area. And for the Graffiti-challenged, HandEra echoes your Graffiti strokes directly underneath your stylus, so you can see what you write as your write it. It's almost like writing on paper. Oh, and since it's part of the display, the Graffiti area can be backlit, making the HandEra 330 much easier to use than older Palms in the dark. Speaking of the backlight, the HandEra 330 uses the "Old School" Indiglo-style backlighting. With the backlight on, you have black text against a light blue background. Since the text is always black, this means the HandEra 330 doesn't have the problem most monochrome Palms have of "washing out" it twilight, where they have light green text against a greenish gold background. The HandEra screen is readable in almost any lighting condition. Running a backlight like that takes power. Fortunately, you have lots of power options with the HandEra. Although the HandEra 330 is exactly the same size and shape as the Palm III series, the battery compartment is dramatically different. For one thing, it holds four AAA batteries instead of two. Also, it's designed to hold an optional Li-ion battery pack, which can be charged via the small AC adapter plug just below where the power button would be on a Palm III. This gives the HandEra the most flexibility of any PalmOS device when it comes to power options: AAA alkalines, AAA rechargeable NiMHs, Li-Ion, or external AC. Not too far above the AC port on the left side of the device, we find two more new features that the Palm III didn't have. The first is a jog dial. This is similar to the jog dial on the HP Jornada Pocket PC in that it is spring-loaded and only rotates about thirty degrees in either direction. Frankly, I prefer this to the free-spinning jog wheel in the Sony devices, as it lets you scroll quickly through a document by just holding the wheel down in the direction you want. Much less finger movement that way than constantly spinning a wheel. Like almost everything else about the HandEra 330, the functionality of the jog dial is configurable. There's a new Prefs panel that defines what each movement of the dial does. Above the jog dial is a button. This can be assigned to do just about anything, but by default it's set up to initiate voice recording. Like Pocket PCs and like no other PalmOS device, the HandEra directly supports recording voice memos. These are saved as WAV files, and they can be recorded directly to a storage card, saving your internal memory. I found the quality was only so-so, but this is useful for recording a quick thought or reminder for review later. I've seen several accounts of people running the recorded WAV files through speech recognition programs on the PC in order to transcribe them into text, which would be an awesome idea for writers like me that think things out verbally, but my laptop is just a lowly Pentium II 233, so I wasn't able to test this for myself. Alas. The HandEra 330 features two card slots for your external expansion needs, one Secure Digital--the same standard as used by the new Palm models--and one Compact Flash, the standard used by most Pocket PCs. Even better, the CF slot is full size, big enough to handle Type II CF cards like IBM's 1GB MicroDrive. (This is why you need so many power options.) The possibilities this opens up are staggering. Imagine having your HandEra 330 plugged into a Palm Portable Keyboard, surfing the web with a CF modem, and saving large documents to your 128MB SD card. The HandEra 330 is the only PalmOS device that can do this, and precious few Pocket PCs can match the feat. An iPaq with a dual PC Card sleeve could do it, but then you're talking about something as big and heavy as some slimline laptops. The @migo comes with an internal modem and a card slot, but Targus doesn't make a keyboard for it yet. If you're looking for a PDA that can function as an outright laptop replacement, this makes the HandEra 330 a very attractive solution. A side effect of the voice recording is the need for a real speaker, rather than the piezo beep-maker found in most PalmOS devices. A side effect of having a real speaker is very loud alarms. Almost absurdly loud alarms. Let me put it this way: if you use your Palm as a travel alarm clock--I've done this--having a HandEra 330 means never being able to use "I didn't hear the alarm go off" as an excuse. If you like, there are third-party utilities that allow you to use WAV files as alarm sounds rather than the built-in MIDI tunes. Imagine waking up every morning to South Park's Eric Cartman shouting "You must respect my AUTHORI-TIE!" Then again, you may not want to do this. The HandEra "fixes" the design of the Palm III series in another way. The stylus silo, except for the very tip, is outside the unit. It's still the same size and shape as on the Palm III, but the barrel of the stylus is mostly exposed to the outside world, and there's a layer of plastic between the stylus barrel and the inner workings of the device. This fixes an annoying design flaw in the Palm III series in which repeatedly inserting and removing the stylus could rub against the display connector, eventually working it loose. As I mentioned before, a great feature of the HandEra 330 is that it's built on the Palm III form factor. That means that nearly every existing peripheral designed for the Palm III series will work without modification on the 330. This was a wise move on HandEra's part, since one of the big issues facing other new devices (Sony CLIÉ, Palm m500 series) is that so few accessories are available. I still can't find a Pilot Pentopia Chameleon Stylus for my CLIÉ, but you can get one that fits the HandEra 330 at any Best Buy. About the only Palm III peripheral I've heard of that doesn't work with the HandEra is the Kodak PalmPix digital camera. The PalmPix uses the PDA screen as a viewfinder, and it ignores the Palm graphics API and writes directly to the screen. Since it's expecting a 160x160 screen, it freaks out on the HandEra. I've heard that you can still take pictures with the PalmPix and the HandEra, and they look fine when transferred to the desktop, but they're unviewable on the device itself. Bad stuffOkay, sounds great so far, right? So what about the bad news? For one thing, because the HandEra is exactly the same size as the Palm III, it's too wide for southpaws to use comfortably. Specifically, the jog dial is just too far up to reach without stretching, and I have fairly large hands. Obviously, it's in a fine place if you aren't left-handed. While the HandEra hi-res mode looks fine for text and vector graphics, it looks really odd with bitmaps. This means pictures in AvantGo, custom fonts in pedit, icons in Diet Assistant and Shadow, and pretty much any game that isn't specifically rewritten to directly support the HandEra screen will look distorted and blocky. Games that understand the QVGA screen, like the card games from Seahorse Software, look great, but most don't. This is a monochrome device. That, in and of itself, isn't really a knock. I know HandEra went with monochrome because they wanted a device that would be both affordable and offer good battery life. That said, I found the screen to be too green. I had hoped it would be the same grayish QVGA monochrome screen found on the Compaq iPaq 3100 series, but instead we got something about the same contrast and hue of the Palm V series. In other words, black and pea-soup-green instead of black and gray or black and white. I spent four years looking at a black and green screen, dating back to my original PalmPilot Professional in 1997, and I'm tired of green. I want a paper white, or nearly so, background. The iPaq does it with a monochrome QVGA screen, so why couldn't HandEra? Also, I noticed that the green offers poorer contrast than the white to yellow-gray reflective screens of the Sony CLIÉ and Compaq iPaq, forcing you to use the backlight in a lot more situations than you'd think. The next device from HandEra should really have the same screen used in the iPaq, either monochrome or color. Most hacks that do anything with the Graffiti area do not work with the HandEra. This includes hacks that allow you to define action strokes like SwitchHack and EVEdit and hacks that enhance the Graffiti area itself, like MiddleCaps. The lack of MiddleCaps alone was pretty much a deal breaker for me. I realize that hacks are hacks, in that they're not an officially supported part of the operating system, and that the things they rely on may be taken away in future devices, but the fact is that it's not worth it to me to give up the ability to automatically capitalize letters that cross the alphanumeric boundary just to be able to make the Graffiti area disappear. And since I'm on the subject, I think the idea of a dismissible Graffiti area is suspect to begin with. In addition to spending a few weeks working with the HandEra 330, I've owned two Pocket PCs, which also have software-based input areas. I've found that a virtual input area is more trouble than it's worth. Like many Palm power-users, I make extensive use of Graffiti shortcuts and command strokes. If I'm in WordSmith and want to toggle full-screen mode for reading, I don't navigate through the menus. I just write command-w, and the title and tool bars go away. I've memorized command strokes for most applications, and make frequent use of command-a to select all, command-c to copy and command-p to paste. In short, even when I'm not actually writing anything, I still get a lot of use out of the Graffiti area, and I can't do that if it's not there. Even when reading an ebook in WordSmith or PalmReader, I like having the Graffiti area available for quickly setting bookmarks or making annotations. A virtual Graffiti area seems like a good idea, and it's been one of the most requested features by Palm users for a long time, but now that I've used it on the Palm and Pocket PC platforms, I've come to the conclusion that it's really more gimmick than it is practical. While using the Prefs panel to set the display mode works in most situations, some applications don't work at all, no matter what you do. Most of these are games that do special tricks with the screen. For example, I couldn't get Acid Solitaire to work no matter what I did. This is a high-resolution solitaire game that looks stunning on my CLIÉ, but just hangs on a blank screen on the HandEra. Setting it to run in the upper left corner at 160x160 didn't help. Another application that is technically usable, but certainly less fun, is Palm Reader, formerly Peanut Reader. In order to handle autoscroll, PalmReader does not write text to the screen via an API HandEra can intercept. Instead, they blit text to a buffer and then display it as a graphic. Like any bitmapped graphic, this is stretched to 150% by the HandEra 330, and it looks horrible, like blotchy anti-aliasing. It looks normal if you run it in one of the 160x160 modes, but then the text is smaller than it would be even on the m100, and very uncomfortable to read. In the Final Analysis...So is the HandEra 330 the ultimate writer's PDA? Well, not quite. To quote the French soldiers in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "It's verra nize," but the poor contrast of the monochrome screen and the graphics issues put it well behind the Compaq iPaq or the new Sony N610C/N710C models. I will say that it's probably tied for first among monochrome PDAs, along with the iPaq 3100 series. The iPaq has the better screen, but the HandEra 330 is smaller when using Compact Flash and the HandEra can run WordSmith. On the whole, though, I can only see a few classes of people that would be better off with the HandEra 330 than shelling out an extra $50 to get the Sony CLIÉ N610C (and keep in mind that you'll have to shell out the extra $50 anyway should you decide to go with the HandEra's Lithium Ion battery pack):
Otherwise, I'd recommend that mobile writers go with either the iPaq or the Sony CLIÉ N610C or N710C, depending whether or not you want mood music while you write. The iPaq offers more power, and the Sony models offer a better screen, fewer compatibility issues, and a smaller package. |