mike.cosentino - Revo Review
Mike
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
PSION REVO
mike.cosentino
After much thought and wanting I walked down to my local computer store and
purchased a Revo.
- ---
Pretty much all of the reviews i have read have crtitcised the really small
keyboard, I really have to disagree. I have large hands and use 10 fingers
to type (4 on the letters and then the thumbs on the spacebar) on normal
keyboards, i have had to learn how to use only 6. Its not so bad, had the
revo for about 2 days and it is getting a-hell-of-a-lot-easier to use and it
is a really comfy keyboard.
- ---
For various reasons Psion and decided to leave out the backlight feature
(and other things, i'll get to those).
The backlight would have been useful but it would have made the battey life
alot shorter. I am using it as i type in poor lighting conditions and i can
see fine (not as good as in broad daylight, but well enough).
The screen is brilliant, very sharp and crisp. The the whole of it being
touch-sensitive with two tocuh sensitive "silk-screen" buttons running dow
the left and bottom of the screen. The lef one has 4 buttons: a menu button
which brings up the EPOC version of the File, Edit, View bar in Windows.
Cut, Paste button which brings up a Cut, Paste, Copy menu. Infrared button
which brings up the infrared send/recieve window. And finally the
magnificaion button which will zoom in and out in applications (i.e. in word
it zooms in on the test, pretty nifty)
- ---
EPOC (Revo's OS) is very quick. and very userfriendly. With this being my
first PDA i am not very knowledgable with Psions (as in speeds of previous
ones) but i had read that the Revo is alot quicker than the Series 3 and the
Series 5, but the same as the Series 5mx. My mom has a oldish Palm and it
is faster than that ... and generaly better.
It uses a ARM 710T processor running at 36MHz, and has 8MB of RAM to store
your applications and documents.
The 8 megs of ram is way over enough, i have the web browser installed and i
have just under 6 meg free.
The built in applications are really useful. There are 12 of them Contacts,
Agenda, Email, Phone, Time, Calc, Jotter, Data, Word, ESetup, Sheet and
Cascade.
- ---
CONTACTS: a glorified address book with alot of dfferent categories. home
and work field, email, addresses and plenty more.
- ---
AGENDA: to-do list, diary, and that sort of stuff. It has 5 different
views: Day, Week, Busy, Anniversary (which shows the entire month with
birthdays and anniversaries), To-Do.
- ---
EMAIL: send and recieve and email, faxes and sms from. Synchronise with
your PC. I like the fact that you can type out sms on your Revo then send
them through your phone's IR port.
- ---
PHONE: useful app that you use via the IR of your cellphone to download and
upload the addressbooks rom it. Very useful when you want to enter a new
number into your phone, and you can use it to synchronise with CONTACTS and
it will fill in the cellphone numbers in CONTANCTS.
- ---
TIME: A word clock with a map and two views, your time,sunrise/set and the
other view is the same but for another country/city in the world. It tells
how far away that city is and other details.
- ---
CALC: Just a calculator. Scientific or normal
- ---
JOTTER: very handy quick note taking app. The note is shown on the left
hand side and a list of all your notes is on the right.
- ---
WORD: pretty much sums itself up microsoft word compatible word-processing
app. It has all the features that you need, 3 fonts built-in (i dunno if you
can get more, but why do you need more) you change the font size. bold
italics underline and other stuff that i have not used.
- ---
CASCADE: pretty fun game that you click on 2 of the same colour circles and
make them dissapear, more than 2 gets you more score.
- ---
DATA: I have actually not used this app but I have heard that it is the old
version of CONTACTS.
- ---
ESETUP: userfriendly internet setup wizard. Taking you through all the
steps to create the internet settings.
- ---
SHEET: Execel compatible spreadsheet program. Since I am not much of a
spreadsheet type of guy, i do not know all the commonly used things in Exel.
I use Autosum, and SHEET has it so Im happy :)
- ---
As for extra apps, places like http://www.go32.com, http://pda.tucows.com
and http://www.epocsoftware.com has more software than you could ever use.
Stuff ranging from GPS software to games ... because you gotta play games
one-in-a-while.
- ---
On the cd you get with the Revo there is the web-browser. I do not think
that Psion thought that most people, who the Revo is aimed at, would want to
surf the web, so i guess that is why the left it out, and le you install it
if you want it or not install it it and free up memory.
- ---
The dimensions of this thing really shocked me, it is TINY. +/-13×8 cm
with a keyboard and a 480×160 pixel screen. The stylus looks pretty crappy
when you compare it with the 5mx one but it is cool when you work with and
it works fine so im fine with it.
- ---
Battery Life has been reported by Psion to last about 14hours on one charge.
Which is about 2 weeks of normal use. Using the IR port, using sounds and
playing games will use the battery more. The battery is actually built into
the machine (unlike the 5mx wich has AA's) and is not user-replaceable.
Dock it in it's cradle and it will start charging.
- ---
In the box there is a docking station (serial connection to your pc), and ac
adaptor and a cd with software for you to load.
PSI Win is the main piece of software you use on your pc to view the psions
hdd (RAM) copy files to and from it. A use full app that gets installed is
PSION BACKUP which makes a full backup onto your PC hdd just in case you
need to hard reset or loose your data oneday.
- ---
All-in-all I would give the Revo a 9 out of 10.
The reason for the 1 missing (actually has nothing to do with the Revo, but
with developers) and that is the smaller screen incompatibilities with older
apps. But at least the good ones are beaing rewritten.
So it is pretty much perfect :)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3ia
Charset: noconv
iQBVAwUBOWW6V8wDYDS4V4OpAQGeogH+Oy9Uy+SX5uVTMeqCgYnuT0wrUl+2Z937
cWuAnhDq3qdk7BbL4cXFmy8kqQdnBR8fqZPgzAAMm3sU+J3g5+aDXg==
=iqlZ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Submissions for comp.sys.psion.announce to: cspa...@lspace.org
All submissions are PGP signed. For Mike's key, finger m...@lugh.tuatha.org.