Zooming In on an Alternate PDA

Zoomer, the Tandy-Casio version of a personal digital assistant, has just hit the stores, offering people in need of a super-organizer a strong alternative to the Apple Newton.

It offers at least 10 times the battery life--about 100 hours--and more built-in applications than Newton, but it lacks the sophistication of Newton’s programming and runs slower.

The Tandy Z-PDA and Casio Z-7000 devices are both built by Casio and are identical except for their labels. They are virtually the same size as the Newton and carry the same $699 price tag.

Zoomers and Newtons are aimed at the same customer: people who want their address book, schedule, to-do lists and calculator functions with them all the time. Unlike smaller and less powerful pocket organizers, the Zoomer and Newton can recognize what you write on their screens with a plastic stylus. With optional connection kits, cables and modems, they can also communicate with personal computers, on-line e-mail, news and stock quote services and paging systems. Both include a PCMCIA card expansion slot to accommodate more memory for data storage, or a modem or pager.

Handwriting recognition is their most noteworthy advance over other organizers. Zoomer approaches the task more simply than Newton, but the results are similar. Both devices require so many corrections to get the text right that it is usually faster to tap out the entry on the pop-up, on-screen simulated keyboards.

Unlike Newton, which learns to match your printing or cursive handwriting against its extensive dictionary of words, Zoomer requires that you print text, which it recognizes letter by letter. I generally had good results, but the process was slow.

For instance, to get it to capitalize letters, you should print only that letter on the screen. Then add the rest of the word once the first letter has been recognized. It’s better to print only one word at a time, writing fast and large. And don’t forget to dot an “i” immediately or it’ll become the numeral 1 or a small L.

Actually, when the Zoomer is in a constrained mode, such as a loan calculation form that recognizes only numbers or the dictionary that wants only lowercase letters, its recognition rate is near 100%.

When I had a contest with a friend who is skilled with his Newton to see who could enter a fortune cookie proverb fastest, he won easily. But the process illustrated an advantage of the Zoomer.

His uncorrected proverb made no sense because when Newton misses, it gets whole words wrong. Mine could be understood, although some words contained several typos. On the other hand, it took him fewer taps to correct the Newton’s errors, because it usually had the right word available in a list of alternate choices, obtained by double-tapping on the wrong word. For each mistake on the Zoomer, I had to carefully position the tiny cursor, backspace, erase the bad letter and write or key in the replacement.

If you can’t tolerate approximately correct entries, yet you want to make entries quickly, Zoomer lets you enter calendar, to-do list and address book items in “power ink,” which is simply a vector graphic image of whatever you write on the screen. You can even manually assign address book entries a place in the alphabetical index. But Zoomer can’t find such entries if you search for a word, because they are not text.

Another disadvantage is that power ink images can take up to 10 times the storage space of comparable text entries. With about 384 kilobytes of data storage, you can’t afford to be wasteful.

The best strategy for using a Zoomer is to buy the optional PalmConnect software and cable package that allows you to connect a Zoomer to a personal computer or Macintosh.

The $129 PC version, which should be available shortly, turns the PC into a big Zoomer and lets you transfer files back and forth between the two. (Having a DOS-compatible file structure gives Zoomer some other operational advantages that Newton lacks, such as being able to have multiple data files made by customizing copies of the address book file.)

With PalmConnect you can import address book data from virtually any other PC personal information manager you have been using, or type in entries on the PC keyboard and send the whole file into the Zoomer. PalmConnect is published by Palm Computing of Los Altos, Calif., which wrote most of the Zoomer applications for Tandy and Casio.

With address data thus easily and efficiently stored as text on the Zoomer, you can afford to make calendar entries in power ink and erase those you don’t need to keep as permanent records. That’s much faster than text recognition. Another Zoomer exclusive is the ability to recognize an ink entry anytime later on. With Newton, recognition can occur only at the time you write the entry.

Among the built-in applications in the Zoomer is a 50,000-word dictionary of definitions and synonyms, which also has a word “jumble” function that looks perfect for playing Scrabble. There is also a way to search for words using wild-card symbols to stand for missing letters, which ought to make crossword puzzles a lot easier to solve.

Another program lets you translate 1,000 words between any two of 26 languages. There is also a version of Intuit’s popular Quicken software with optional PC software coming that will link Zoomer and PC Quicken data.

Communication software to connect with America Online is also installed. All you need to do is add a modem. There are about a dozen other applications and games stuffed into the four megabytes of read-only memory in the Zoomer.

So which is better, Zoomer or Newton? Whichever one you buy, you’ll wish you had some features available only on the other.

Zoomer’s 100-hour battery life on three AA alkaline cells means you don’t even have to think about batteries for weeks at a time. My friend with the Newton thinks about batteries all the time.

Another valuable feature of the Zoomer is its built-in cover, which folds back flat or can be used to stand the unit up. It protects the screen when you’re carrying the Zoomer in a pocket, purse or briefcase. Newton’s screen is exposed unless you slide it into its slip case when not in use.

On the other hand, the Newton’s ability to understand the context of entries by recognizing keywords such as meet or call and then appropriately assign them to the proper list is the way of the future for personal digital assistants.

But until Newton can run 100 hours on its batteries and do a quicker job of text recognition, Zoomer is a good alternative.