Selecting a PDA has become a difficult task these days. Today you can choose
between tiny quasi-PDAs like the PalmPilot, portable Rolodexes, translators,
business card scanners, as well as real computers (in my opinion) such as the
Zaurus, Windows CE-based palmtops, and of course, the trailblazing Newton
series. And if you can work in another language such as Japanese, there are even
more choices.
Since I've been trying to learn Japanese and was in the market for a PDA at
the same time, I thought I'd try to find a Japanese-English dictionary available
for a US-market PDA. While I didn't find any, I soon discovered that many PDAs
released in Japan include this feature. This led me to start looking at the
Japanese Zaurus line, since companies like Dialect apparently made it easy for
US buyers to purchase these systems.
In the process of researching the Zaurus line, I stumbled onto a reference
about a color PDA: the Zaurus MI-10. As I read about the features of this new
system, I realized that it was worth paying a little more than I had originally
planned to have one of these systems. Actually, since I was leaning towards a
Newton before discovering the Color Zaurus, the price difference wasn't really
so great.
I must add that I had somewhat different expectations than the typical PDA
shopper. I wanted a PDA with a full set of connectivity features including
telnet, email and Web browsing. In other words, I was looking for something
that would replace my laptop and leave plenty of room in my briefcase for books.
I'm always lugging around some computer book I need to read (no doubt expecting
to transfer the information from the closed text through my hand and directly to
my brain!).
I also wanted to be able to jot down notes and manage my schedule, but I
wasn't interested in managing my personal finances or writing papers on a PDA.
The Color Zaurus seemed to fit the bill perfectly with a graphical Web browser,
telnet, MIME-compliant email, a calendar application, a notepad, together with
the ability to recognize both Japanese and English characters -- and the much
sought-after Japanese-English dictionaries. With the yen down against the
dollar, the price also fit my budget. So I started shopping online.
Surprisingly, buying a Color Zaurus was more difficult than I expected.
Dialect didn't carry it and the only vendors that did were in Japan.
Descriptions, prices, and ordering information were all in Japanese. I quickly
learned the Kanji for essential words like "yen", "price",
and most importantly, "sale"! Surfing Japanese Web pages is actually
not as difficult as one might imagine.
The majority of the Web sites have Romanji-titled links, so if you pass your
cursor over the link, you'll see anchors such as index, preview, and order.
Scanning links saves time when your Kanji vocabulary barely exceeds that of a
first grade Japanese student. The greatest time-saver was the ubiquitous mailto:
link. I emailed nearly a half dozen sites.
Some surely deleted my foreign babble upon opening the message, since most
did not bother to reply. One sent back a reply that they did not ship overseas.
Finally, I received a reply in fairly good English that said "yes"
they would ship overseas, told me what their prices were (in yen of course), and
told me how to order. Because of my limited knowledge of Japanese grammar, I
carefully constructed a fax in simple, clear English to make sure I didn't end
up purchasing a toaster or VCR instead of a PDA.
My Color Zaurus arrived in a large white box with red hearts, covered in
Hiragana and Kanji. The postmaster wondered aloud where in the world this
package had come from. She looked and sounded like someone who'd just discovered
frozen Chinese food in the grocery store. I told her it was a small Japanese
computer from Tokyo and her eyes glazed over as is often the case with older,
less computer-literate (read: people with a life) people.
I rushed home and carefully unwrapped the contents, amused at how totally
foreign the manuals and various loose sheets of paper appeared. Even the shock
absorbing material consisted of a chain of sausage-like transparent bubbles
complemented by rolls of Japanese newspapers. I examined the AC adapter,
battery, and main unit carefully to see if plugging it into a US outlet wouldn't
result in a deep-fry on my countertop.
Being naive about electricity, I decided that the numbers were "close
enough." In a few seconds, a beautiful full-color "Welcome to Zaurus
World" boot screen appeared, surrounded by indecipherable buttons (I knew I
should have learned Katakana BEFORE Hiragana!).
Within minutes, I'd scheduled a fake meeting and stumbled through the
graphics program. Already I was anxious to try out the built in graphical Web
browser, but I had been away from work long enough that morning. I shut the
Zaurus down so the battery could charge, ate lunch, and took it in to work. As I
showed it to my office-mates, I felt a mixture of pride and complete
foolishness.
I had trouble relating my reasons for purchasing a computer from overseas
rather than picking something from Office Max. I told one person I wanted it to
help me learn Japanese, another I wowed with the color screen, and still another
heard all about the Internet capabilities which I could neither locate nor
demonstrate.
By then, I was thoroughly embarrassed yet more determined than ever to use
my PDA as effectively as the Newton-o-philes scattered around our Mac-heavy
campus used their pea-green digital pen pals.
The system turned out to be quite a remarkable piece of work. The 320 x 200
16-bit color active matrix LCD is as good as the best laptop screen. The system
is built around the same Hitachi 32-bit RISC processor under the hood of most
Windows CE palmtops, but seems to run much faster. The handwriting recognition
also seemed better than the Newton's much-maligned system.
I was particularly amazed that it recognized English, French, Kanji,
Hiragana, Katakana, and even Cyrillic characters without any clue beyond the
stroke of a pen. The applications used icons most American computer users would
recognize, though it did take me a little while to realize that yellow meant "no"
or "cancel". And as soon as I read the text on its cyan counterpart,
which said "hai", or "yes", I realized the other button had
the opposite effect.
Admittedly, I did a lot of random button-pushing at first, but I never
managed to do any permanent damage or lose any data.
The Color Zaurus runs a proprietary operating system and supports limited
multitasking. It has handwriting recognition, application data exchange, and
basic productivity applications such as word processing and graphics, along with
a rich set of communication applications.
In fact, it has the best set of connectivity features I've ever seen in a
PDA. For starters, it has a built-in 2400/9600 data/fax modem. For Japanese
users, there is NiftyServe -- a popular Japanese CompuServe-like service as well
as preconfigured access to many other Japanese Internet access providers.
In addition, all users can take advantage of a fully functional telnet
application, a MIME-compliant POP mail client, and a nearly HTML 3.2-compliant
graphical Web browser. The Web browser is a masterpiece that is not likely to be
rivaled on PDAs until Netscape is ported to Windows CE systems. It supports
inline GIFs, tables, forms, has bookmarks, automatic document caching, support
for proxies, a JPEG viewer, support for WAV audio files, and can be configured
to automatically access a set of pages from your bookmark file while you shower
or have breakfast.
It can view Web pages in Japanese, English, or any of a half-dozen European
languages. Graphics are automatically scaled so that the average Web page is
displayed on the screen without forcing you to scroll around. If the graphics
are too small to read in this mode, you can switch to a virtual 640 x 480 mode
for crisp, colorful renderings of even the smallest buttons and menus.
And of course the Color Zaurus also sends and receives faxes and can
exchange data with other computing devices via its built-in infrared
communications port.
Multimedia is another of the Color Zaurus' strong suits. It has a built-in
audio recording application. Graphics and text files can also contain voice
annotations. Many applications directly support email, IR transfer, and faxing
of their contents. The graphics application has more features than many desktop
image manipulation packages.
For example, you can quickly create maps by using the dozens of built-in
road, train, building, and sign icons. Images can contain a mixture of text and
graphics, graphics can be rotated, and there are several different fill patterns
for rectangular areas, along with several line drawing tools. When the Zaurus is
equipped with its optional PC Card digital camera, you have a true portable
photo shop!