John Nowak
Member
Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Redwood City CA
Posts: 472 |
I've got one. Through this, I'll say "Visor" instead of "Palm OS Device with IR Beaming Capacity" even though the watch should work identically with a Palm or TRGPro.
The watch itself (as a watch) is fairly poor on features. There is no countdown timer, which is a pain. The alarm cannot be set for specific days of the week, so the "Off to work!" alarm goes off over the weekend unless you turn it off manually. This is a problem unless you want to set up your "Go to work!" alarm as a repeating zero-length appointment on your Visor...
Also missing is a "Synchronize time" feature, which could be quite useful if a GPS module ships (GPS works using hyper-accurate clocks so GPS modules will likely synchronize your Visor to the GPS signal, giving your device unprecedented accuracy.)
I found the watch fairly easy to reset and such. The controls are limited, and there's a lot of the usual jumping-though-hoops that using a device with only ten buttons entails, but given the limits, I'd call the device quite usable. It's nicely made, and attractive. There's a backlight, and a stopwatch.
The screen is split into two parts, lengthwise. The top is an LCD matrix capable of showing alphanumeric characters; the bottom half is a standard digits-only display. The digits only display is very easy to read, and shows the time well. The alphanumeric fonts are not as clear as those on the Visor, and is, of course, tiny.
You need a fingernail and patience to work the buttons.
The watch comes with a CD with a Palm program that enables you to beam Address, Schedule, To-Do, and Memos to the watch and back again. I have not beamed from the watch back to my Visor, as text editing on the watch is, necessarily, an agonizing process of scrolling up and down the entire alphabet ...
Beamed memos are truncated at the first carriage return in the memo, which is clearly a bug. However, I don't feel a major need to read memos on a tiny screen eight characters wide and two lines tall, so I'm content to wait for a bug fix.
I have not experimented much with the to-dos, as they're much easier to work with on the Visor.
The most useful things to synchronize with a watch, in my opinion, are the Schedule and Address books. Casio shares this view, as the watch has buttons which takes you directly to these functions.
The address book is quite clever. Navigation is a bit of a pain, but it does work, and I like the idea of having my address book backed up on my watch in case I have an urgent need to call my boss when I'm out of town and my Visor is broken or something. It's more difficult to use than the Visor's, but I see it primarily as a backup anyway, so this isn't a problem for me. One curious issue is that while it can store multiple numbers for one person, it cannot tell you what the numbers are: I have three numbers for my boss, but it doesn't say if they are his home, work, or pager number. Fortunately, most things like that are easy to identify by area code. The address book does store email addresses or other text as well, but to display them, it needs to use the alphanumeric section of the screen, which means you need to remember which record you have open. This is not an issue, but is a good approach to the limits of the hardware.
Beamed schedule items with alarms are given alarms that fire ten minutes before the time listed. This happens to correspond with my Visor default settings, which is fine. I'm surprised, though, that the beaming application does not have the ability to set the alarm offset on a per item basis.
Beaming Schedule items works smoothly. The default is to send one week of Schedule items at a go, which is more than sufficient in my opinion.
I suspect there is a bug in selecting Addresses to beam. I have been unable to find specific addresses which I thought I selected to beam several times. When I beamed my entire address book, however, I was unable to find any missing addresses. If I were testing for Casio, I'd strongly recommend looking into this.
In conclusion, I'm not going to turn it back in. The synchronization process has bugs, but they are not severe enough to make it unusable. My biggest concerns, honestly, is the fact the watch _as a watch_ has some nasty shortcomings: the absence of a countdown timer is particularly grating. I'd rather have a countdown timer or two than a stopwatch. Also, the simplicity of the alarm is another problem.
|
05-10-2000 09:05 PM
Email This Page to Someone! |
Receive updates to this thread
]