Psion 5MX and HP Jornada

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I wrote these reviews in the Summer of 2000.

Palm Keyboard

The Palm Keyboard (available for about £70 from most people who sell Pilots – I got mine from Buy.com) is the most useful addition to the Pilot I have seen. Anyone who uses a Pilot – and I am absolutely addicted to my Pilot V – will know that it can be very frustrating trying to enter lots of text using the stylus. This makes the Pilot a good way of keeping a portable copy of your desktop PC’s contents but a bad way of entering in new information on the road. The keyboard changes all of that.

It comes in a black neoprene case about the size of a cigarette packet. To set it up, you unzip the case, take out the keyboard and release a small catch. The keyboard them unpacks itself into a ‘W’ shape resembling nothing more than a James Bond gadget. You flatten the W and it forms a full size flat keyboard with normal keys. There is a small docking port for the pilot which is supported at a readable angle by the keyboard itself. The whole process takes a second or two.

Once seated in the keyboard chassis, the Pilot is operated by the keyboard like a very small PC. You can type long memos and emails, enter new addresses or diary appointments without cramping your fingers using the stylus. It has all the attributes of a great gadget – it’s cool and it’s functional. I now have visions of myself, during my current sabbatical, sitting in a café writing my novel on the Pilot and drinking cappuccino!

More information is available from Palm’s website at www.palm.com.

Laplink 2000

I have used Laplink in its various versions for years. For a while I used it to connect to the office while I was on my travels because it let access my desktop machine remotely. Internet services like Visto made this less important for me and I got a good network adaptor for my laptop so I could transfer files more easily over the office network.

Now, however, I have left my company following a management buy-out and I don’t have an always-on Internet connection and I don’t have a network. Suddenly Laplink is really useful again so I got the latest version and installed it on my trusty old Libretto portable and on my home PC and put it to the test. I got my copy direct from Laplink (www.laplink.com/uk where you can download the software immediately for £109.99).

It comes with a serial cable and a parallel cable so that it can connect pretty much any PC to any other PC. I used the parallel cable because it would be faster than a serial cable. I also got a USB cable for future use because it is even faster, but my poor old Libretto doesn’t have a USB port. Firstly, I did a file transfer to bring across about a very large backup of my old work PC. It transferred the files at about a third of the speed of a typical office network, which is pretty good for a cable connection. You can transfer files using a Windows Explorer type window or by setting up ‘Xchange Agents’ which automatically synchornise a set of files between a laptop and PC so that both machines are using the latest versions of a given set of files.

Then I tried remote controlling my Libretto from my PC. Doing this has an Alice through the Looking Glass feeling to it. By some magic, it displays the screen of host PC in a window of another and when that window it is as if the host PC was ‘inside’ the one you’re using. This is really useful for me because the Libretto has a tiny keyboard and screen and while it is fine for travel it isn’t much fun to do housekeeping and software installation on it at home. Using Laplink I can easily do this kind of thing using my main screen and keyboard. What’s really cool is that while I am on a trip I could dial into my main PC, using a modem instead of a cable, and do the reverse, for example to pick up some files or use a piece of software (like my Jeppeson flight planning stuff) that I don’t have on my portable.

The old version of Laplink used to do all of this but it required you to dial directly into a host PC. So this meant an international call from the US for me. Now, however, I can connect over the Internet which means that I can make a free local call in the US and still access my desktop PC. That is assuming BT ever get round to installing my ADSL fast Internet connection!

Laplink will allow you to chat to someone using another computer, either by text or if a microphone and speakers are installed, by voice. This plus the remote control facility makes Laplink a godsend for technical support.

Overall, Laplink isn’t a tool that everyone will need and it seems unlikely that anyone will use all its features. However, if you need to remote control PCs or transfer files using cables or a dial-up connection rather than a LAN it is the easiest and best way to do it.