From: Aron Roberts (aron_at_socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 07:11:59 PDT
Hi Carol,
This may be wildly outside your Professor's comfort zone, but you
might consider at least cursorily looking at the AlphaSmart Dana:
http://www.alphasmart.com/products/dana_overview.html
It's a Palm OS-based laptop, very rugged and light (2.0 pounds!), and
inexpensive when compared with Tablet PCs. It also offers extremely
long battery life, measured in days, not hours, of use between
recharges. A detailed review is at:
http://www.epinions.com/content_88651763332
While the Dana comes with software for desktop file exchange, you might
wish to enhance it by adding DataViz' "Documents To Go" software, which
offers excellent synchronization with Microsoft Office-based formats:
http://www.palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?prodID=2856
In addition, there are software products bundled with, or available at an
extra cost from, AlphaSmart, which also claim compatibility with
the file formats of various MS Office applications.
What I'm unclear of is whether software available for the Dana
does a good job of permitting "ink-based" annotation of Office
documents -- or any other typical documents that your professor might
wish to annotate, for that matter. (I'm assuming that's their interest
in a tablet-style computer, as opposed to a conventional laptop.)
The vendor, AlphaSmart, might be able to answer that question.
In addition, you might initially look at Informal Software's "enotate"
products for this purpose, which claim to offer that functionality.
The Dana does come with a full-sized keyboard, so the professor
wouldn't need to necessarily learn "Graffiti," the Palm OS's
stylus-based data entry mechanism, as pointed out in the Eopinions.com
review above.
So, for about $400 (hardware) and perhaps $200 (third party software),
as well as perhaps a couple of hundreds of dollars of someone's time,
in a worst case, to investigate and put together a working environment,
this would make a most intriguing alternative, *assuming* all of the
parts above work as advertised, and can be integrated into a user-friendly
system for writing, note-taking, and annotation.
This may not be your (or your professor's) "cup of tea," but perhaps
by posting this suggestion to Micronet, others who have applications
suited for this device might benefit ...
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
P.S. I occasionally use a much older, non-Palm OS, notetaking device
from AlphaSmart, and have long found it to be just a terrific product.
I haven't used the Dana, however.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:
For information about Micronet, including subscribing to
or unsubscribing from its mailing list and finding out
about upcoming meetings, please visit the Micronet Web site:
<http://micronet.berkeley.edu/>.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jun 25 2003 - 07:15:33 PDT