.KEYWORD gotype
.FLYINGHEAD HARDWARE REVIEW
.TITLE On the go with the GoType keyboard
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY Every so often an add-on product comes along that seems totally obvious. So obvious, in fact, that you might wonder why Palm Computing didn’t create it themselves. One such product is the GoType keyboard, a device that looks like the strange offspring of a Palm cradle and a laptop keyboard. In this detailed review, our intrepid contributing editor, Fredlet, takes the GoType out for a spin. Should you rush out to buy your very own keyboard? Read Fredlet’s review and find out.
.AUTHOR S. Fred Green a.k.a. Fredlet
Let’s face it, I’ll probably never write Graffiti as fast as I type. This can be a drawback at times since I often take only my Palm device with me for checking email when I’m out snooping into obscure corners of the globe (well, visiting my Dad’s house). In general, my emails aren’t terribly long, but if I’m limited to Graffiti entry, I use "yep", "nope" and a lot of shortcuts I created in Preferences. I bought a Newton Keyboard and PiloKey to try to alleviate the symptoms of S.E.S. (Short Email Syndrome) but with it I had to carry around either a cradle or a HotSync cable and something to prop up the Palm organizer.
This approach worked tolerably well, but I really had to be ready to sit down and do some serious piloting to set up the keyboard. Some enterprising individual created a blueprint of how to graft a HotSync port onto the Newton keyboard, but it was fairly involved for your average user.
What I wanted was something small, all-in-one, and purple.
Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Landware’s response was the GoType keyboard, shown in Figure A. This custom-designed keyboard is slightly smaller than the Newton keyboard and includes a cradle to hold the Palm device, a built-in cover, and the four standard function buttons . It also has an extendable foot for stability that really comes in handy when you are typing. It’s a standard QWERTY key layout but can handle the Dvorak key layout through a preference in the driver.
.FIGPAIR A The GoType keyboard has a nice, Palm-like look to it.
For touch typists, the F and J keys have little raised plastic dots for location. No batteries are required to power they keyboard as it gets its minimal power from the Palm device itself. I’m curious as to whether or not there is significant drain on the Palm device batteries as there is from leaving the Palm unit in the standard cradle for periods of time.
.H1 Getting started
Although Landware claims that the required keyboard driver consumes only 10K of RAM, my Info panel shows that it actually consumes 19K. Even though the data sheet suffers from marketing RAM deflation disease, it’s still a very small RAM price to pay for the added benefit. Landware also provides a HackMaster driver for those of you who like to tweak everything that you can on your organizer.
After I performed a precautionary HotSync, I put my Palm device on the keyboard’s connector, enabled the driver, and started typing in my favorite application. Landware says you can even play games with the keyboard, but I guess the ones I have loaded aren’t set up for that.
Performing a HotSync with the Newton Keyboard and PiloKey software active was an impossibility. You had to go to the driver, open it, and disable it before the serial port was freed up for a HotSync. This time, the Landware folks have made the driver automatically sense the keyboard so that you don’t have to disable the driver by hand. This is a big help, since I’m always forgettting to turn off the driver in PiloKey.
.H1 Physical attributes
LandWare’s GoType keyboard is 10" x 4" x 0.75". It is smaller than the Newton Keyboard. That, in and of itself, has pros and cons.
First the pros. I like the fact that it’s self-contained and very lightweight. Since it’s only 11 ounces, I don’t notice any added weight in my bag.
Cons: Someone with smaller hands will find it easier to adapt to the smaller keyboard, but someone with larger hands will have to be very careful of where his or her fingers strike. Even though I have fairly small hands, my first foray into typing on the GoType looked like this: "M6y cat oisan’yt veryu pasrtioal bnastjh weatetr." (which in English actually says "My cat isn’t partial to bathwater."). After about an hour or so of playing around with the keyboard, my typing improved quite a bit. However, I still run into an occasional problem because of the up arrow being where I expect the Shift key to be. That is pretty annoying since I have to figure out exactly where I started to type into a previous sentence, copy it and correct it.
I spent a significant amount of time searching for an acceptable case for my Newton keyboard setup, but was never really pleased with the items I found in my search. Landware has pre-empted my search for a GoType case solution by creating a case, shown in Figure B, for the keyboard, Palm device and another pocket that will be perfect for my modem. At $19.95 it appears to be quite a bargain, but I’ll have to withhold judgement since I haven’t gotten to hold it in my own hands and run it through its paces.
.FIGPAIR B You’ll be on the go with the GoType keyboard case.
.PAGE
.H1 Conclusions and strange animals
All in all, the GoType keyboard behaved well and I was able to type very quickly with no lag time. However, when I left the Palm organizer on the stand in the off position for more than a minute or two, the keyboard driver disabled itself, though removing the Palm device from the keyboard and turning off and on reset it back to normal. It wasn’t a terrible inconvenience, but it was a little inconsistent with how well everything else was working. I’ll assume this is a bug, albeit a minor one.
I’m all for tiny toys, and this tiny toy rocks the house. Four out of five wildebeasts for the GoType keyboard, with an additional wildebeast when they move the Shift key back to its standard position. (for those of you keeping track, I’ve decided to move into the larger mammalian rating system.)
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
You can find the GoType keyboard, it’s case, and the old Newton keyboard PiloKey software at http://www.landware.com.
GoType keyboard FAQ http://www.landware.com/support/gotype_faq.html.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6c4e0
