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Jonathan Mosen/Main Menu PAC Mate Review
His evaluation is, for the most part, objective and impartial and we appreciate his energy and candor. However, it should be noted that Jonathan was using a pre-production unit, so some areas of performance that he comments on are not representative of the shipping product. Below are some statements (with time stamps) that we feel should be clarified: Part I, February 26, 2003:1:19-1:50: Jonathan says – PAC Mate was a source of considerable friction within Freedom Scientific. Blazie wanted a Linux unit, while Henter-Joyce wanted a Pocket PC. Henter-Joyce won and that resulted in people leaving Freedom Scientific.While this is an interesting story, nobody left Freedom Scientific over the decision to go with the Pocket PC platform. 10:24: Jonathan says – They're aiming at 12-18 hours of battery life.The battery life of the PAC Mate is of course dependent on the usage profile. However, at FS we test the units by "babbling them down" from a 100 percent charge, speaking constantly and opening and closing applications. In this test, we exceed 10 hours of constant use. Based on your own usage pattern of powering off for periods of time and the unit going into a sleep mode if left idle for several minutes, you can extrapolate what you should expect (probably several times this). When the battery reaches critically low, a warning is issued. Shortly thereafter, the unit goes into a hibernation mode where it cannot be used, but your data is backed up for 72 hours. Always turn the unit off before removing the battery. You have 30 minutes of backup power to allow time to reinsert a new battery or plug in AC power. 16:42-17:08: Jonathan says – I have found the PAC Mate slightly sluggish. The slow response is a little disconcerting.Since Jonathan’s evaluation on a pre-production unit we have been able to enhance the responsiveness significantly by reordering the priority of interrupts as well as changing the timing of many polling processes. We have tested these iterations in–house as well as recruiting some of the fastest typists among our user base to ensure our progress on this point. 42:15-42:24: Jonathan says – I can't up arrow nearly as rapidly as I can down arrow, it's getting stuck.Jonathan has a pre-production unit with a sticky switch. A lighter switch was implemented before initial shipments. 57:05-57:41: Jonathan says – PAC Mate doesn't keep up with you at a reasonable typing speed, I understand this has been addressed … but I have found that it has made typing documents at any speed, impossible because it's just so riddled with errors that it's not worth the bother.The aforementioned reprioritization of interrupts has helped the keyboard speed significantly. In addition, we found that some characters were being dropped when typing quickly in single line edit fields. This has been addressed in release 1.10. 1:26:24-1:27: Jonathan turns the volume up and hears more noise while it's charging saying its because of a poor translation between the power transformer and the audio.Subsequent to Jonathan’s review, we made one more pass on the printed circuit board, rerouting the charging circuitry farther away from the audio circuitry and adding capacitance to eliminate the hum you hear on his unit. 1:48: Jonathan questions why there's no e-mail filter to organize e-mail into different folders.Actually, you can create your folders and rules in desktop Outlook and you can select which folders to carry over to PAC Mate through ActiveSync. Part II, March 5, 200324:50-25:50: Jonathan says he doesn't think Pocket Excel accessibility is completed yet.We did not have it complete at the time of the review. We completed it with release 1.10. 29:58-30:17: Jonathan says you can't save Excel as HTML.This is one of the functions of desktop Excel that is not in Pocket Excel, along with the graphing functions and support for inserting objects into the spreadsheet. 30:37-31:57: Jonathan questions the help from within Excel.We did not have it complete at the time of the review. We completed it with release 1.10. 1:07: Jonathan says the recording playback is a bit noisy (a bit "yuck").This was certainly true on Jonathan’s unit, which was plugged into AC during his evaluation. This has been improved by suspending battery charging during recording, rerouting charging circuitry away from the audio circuitry, and changing the level on the AGC to lower the noise floor. 1:13: Jonathan says for whatever reason Freedom Scientific offers Windows Media Player help, but they don't install Windows Media Player, you have to do it yourself.Windows Media is not included in the ROM image we licensed from Microsoft. It is included on the Companion CD that comes with the product, as does Outlook for your desktop PC. We include JAWS help files for Windows Media on the unit, so be sure to answer “No to All” during installation or the help we provide will be overwritten by the standard Windows Media help. 1:34: Jonathan tries MSN messenger with the precursor that FS doesn't promise it will work, but lets find out if it does …(1:43 It doesn't tell you who just signed on … FS doesn't claim to support it.)MSN Messenger scripts will be included in the next release. 1:51: Jonathan sums up his own personal findings of his four-hour review: (1:52:55 "The product is still rough around some of its edges. In my view, it's unacceptably sluggish. The delay from when you press a key and get a response is, for me, unacceptable. Excel has yet to be scripted. … For many of us who rely on Braille, the jury will still be out until we see the Braille version of PAC Mate. And Grade II Braille is implemented everywhere other than FSEdit and that's a little quirky.This is indicative of how early a unit Jonathan was using. Grade II Braille was implemented everywhere before our first commercial shipments.
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Jonathan
Mosen performed an extensive review of the PAC Mate in two segments of
his ACB Radio program that aired February 26, 2003 and March 5, 2003.
