On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Robert Davis wrote:
> However, the Motorola Pagewriter seems a threat. Motorola lent
> Pagewriters out to all the Lotus people at the Lotusphere conference
> in January, and they loved it. I asked a Motorola guy if they were
> going after the Palm VII space and he said 'absolutely'.
Motorola will lose. Palm has a greater threat from something like a
minstrel modem (and mainly because of their higher but flat rate). If I
used the Palm VII (which I did get to play with) as much as I wanted, it
would be too expensive.
I have a pagewriter 2000 and never use it. The UI stinks - you have an
arrow button pad and must use it since they don't let you type D to get to
the done key or other obvious things. Imagine Windows without a mouse and
without being able to hold the alt or control keys down.
Also the last 6 recharge cycles were from a 100% charged battery. Every
time I jiggle the docking station it detects a disconnect for a few
milliseconds so initiates a new cycle where it completely discharges and
recharges the battery. Nor can you remove the battery and put it in the
docking station well and put the pager so it will run on the connection
power and not have any problems if jiggled. Or at least they say you
can't, but the loose fit works both ways :).
The reason I have it is because it is bulker than the palm, and the person
who already had a matchbox sized pager didn't wan't to "upgrade". The
keyboard also too small to type, so rarely gets used to send email
messages - everyone waits until they are back at their desks.
I also have the devkit. They have their own IDE and script language and I
can't get a hello world type program working. If I spent a lot of time I
might be able to do something, but they are specifically missing
documentation much less calls that would allow me to use the IrDA
interface (it isn't an IrDA stack as far as I can tell, but uses the SIR
layer and some kind of packetization that is IrDA frame like).
I would like to beam messages from my palm to email them on the
pagewriter, or beam received messages on the pagewriter to my palm, but I
am not able to do that with their API.
