Steve and his Sony Magic Link - Week 2
Fall/1994
I'll keep posting these until people tell me to shut up. 8-)Plusses -------
* The unit has worked very well. I've only found one legit bug and its known by Sony (see below).
* I've found that navigating around has not slowed me down over my Newton. Yes, showing the monthly view is too slow, but the extra bandwidth is nice and I've not been in a situation where I had to say "please wait a minute Mr. CEO while I look up my month...no! Wait! Really! It'll show up soon!" 8-)
* I've done several backups and restores. It backs up almost instantly. It restores in a respectable amount of time (considering this is not a day to day operation)
* That good old engineering spirit. Go downtown, make a coupon with the text 'parade' (option-kbd) and drop it on downtown. 8-)
Minuses -------
* Found a Sniffy bug (poor Sniffy, he must have worms) where if the text you are searching is both in the body of a message *and* in the 'about' field, Sniffy will cycle between the two places in a loop.
* There are some operations that are dreadfully slow. I have all of my data on the card and if I take out the card, the Magic Link can take up to two minutes to turn on. This may be a real bummer for people like me who need to swap often between the pager card and a ram card.
* Removing packages (physically or my wrapping up a package) is really slow, too, on the order of minutes.
* I'd be interested in getting betas of the backup software to users, just so they could have some form of external backup available.
* Dragging items to the trash, quickly, can sometimes have a wierd response, where you'll see the icon show near the trash, then over it. Several times I thought that I had dropped it by accident.
* Ink burps. When writing with a lot of ink, sometimes it doesn't catch a stroke or two. I guess its thinking. I'm writing slower now and its keeping up, but it would be nice to flail in ink mode and have it catch all the strokes.
Neutral -------
* I had a situation today where someone sent me a 80K attachment, and I was reading mail while getting mail and my communicator completely ran out of memory.
Unlike my current Newton, which would have punted the ball away, the Magic Link said it was looking for things that I could throw away. This took an unbelievable 5 minutes. Then, with nothing I wanted to toss (it was all on my RAM card no less!) I did a clean up (another couple of minutes) then it ran low again (another 3 minutes) and finally, after what seemed like 30 minutes, I got back to using my Magic Link.
The problem was really this large attachment, which went into main ram, and when I tried to read it, then delete it, that used more main ram, and since I was doing this while getting even more mail (one with voice on it) the SML just comeplete ran out of memory.
Its good it didn't crash. Its bad that it could not have used my RAM card temporarily to get out of the siutation.
The gateway software needs to have rules to strip uuencodes or MIME attachments.
This just goes to show that the main units should have at least 2 (I really want 4) megs of internal RAM.
Why? This thing *is* a communicator. It does things my Mac email does not do (short voice annotations, ink, stamps) *and* it allows me to imbed other objects (sheesh, OpenDoc 1994)
But, if my mailman *had* to, by *law*, fit all my mail into my mailbox, including packages, then you'd be darn sure I'd have a 10ftx10ft mailbox! 8-)
I'm pretty surprised at how much email I am doing on it, even without the keyboard. I think I'd buy the keyboard, but only at $50, not $100.
Summary -------
I'm still using it! Its still replaced my Newton. The battery is still awesome! Some people think its too big; Some people think its too cute; I think its too cool!
Now, ***WHERE*** are the headphones!!!!!!!
Steve
© Copyright 1997-2002 Steve Riggins. Graphics by Andrew Duncan.
