Boring Tablet PC plus Sleeping Pills

Boring Tablet PC plus Sleeping Pills

Boring Tablet PC plus Sleeping Pills

FOR years, your itinerant correspondent toted a palmtop computer, rather than a laptop, to do his e-mail as well as to file stories while on his peregrinations abroad. The first pocket-size computer he bought back in the late 1980s was a diminutive DOS machine made by Sharp of Japan. It weighed under a pound (454 grams), had a tiny six-inch (15cm) monochrome screen, a two-thirds-size qwerty keyboard, a painfully slow dial-up modem, and a rechargeable battery that lasted for just about 12 hours. Though limited in performance, it got the job doneand was an easy compromise to accept when laptops and their paraphernalia weighed in at over 12lb.

When, after a decade of use and abuse, the trusty little Sharp finally broke beyond repair, it was replaced with a more up-to-date equivalent made by Hewlett-Packard of California. Likewise, the HP Jornada 720 weighed little more than a pound, had a two-thirds-size keyboard, a battery life of around 12 hours, and could be slipped just as readily into an inside pocket.With higher resolution and colour, the HP palmtop"s six-inch touchscreen could handle graphics as well as text. Its pared-down version of Microsoft Windows allowed it to sync files with Microsoft Office and Outlook on a server or desktop PC. And a wireless card gave it instant access to the internet whenever an open WiFi signal was within range. An active developer community devoted to the platform provided, invariably for free, all the applications, utilities and games needed to make life easier still. The Jornada 720 became such a faithful companion that your correspondent even slept with it under his pillow at night, allowing messages from half a world away to be read and answered while still half asleep.After another decade of heavy use, the little HP palmtop has now packed up irreparably, too. Apart from a few kanji-character machines made for the Japanese domestic market, there is nothing available today that could take the Jornada 720"s place.

While easy to slip into a pocket, and fine for texting, or even composing the odd e-mail, smart phones with slide-out keyboards, like the Samsung Epic 4G or the Motorola Droid 2, are much too cramped for more than an hour or so of continuous use. Attractive as it may be, Apple"s popular iPad tablet is not the solution either. It is too heavy (1.5lb) and bulky (7.5 inches by 9.6 inches) to slip into a pocket for use on the hoof. Also, the tablet"s large, unprotected screen makes it somewhat fragile. Yes, Apple sells a protective case for the iPad. You can even buy a docking stand and external keyboard for it as well. And that is needed because while virtual keyboards are adequate for making notes, mechanical keyboardswith their double-sprung keys and shock-stopsare essential for serious typing. But the question then becomes, why bother when all you are going to finish up with is a piece of luggage as cumbersome as a laptop? You might as well carry a mini-notebook like a MacBook Air and have done with the crippled operating system and limited features of an iPad.

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