Newsgroups: comp.sys.palmtops
Subject: Re: wizard/hp95lx
From: vcmgt0j7@VAX.CSUN.EDU (Mingfang Li)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 00:19:34 GMT
Reply-To: vcmgt0j7@VAX.CSUN.EDU
Organization: Cal State Northridge

In article <1992Apr15.223651.21708@src.honeywell.com>, kanefsky@src.honeywell.com (Steve Kanefsky) writes:
>In article <6384@lib.tmc.edu> jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr15.155117.16534@csun.edu> vcmgt0j7@VAX.CSUN.EDU writes:
>>>Wizard's software is better designed, phone book, memo (truly what it means), 
>>>appointment book (especially its weekly view), and outline programs are very 
>>>well conceived. Its keyboard is better.
>>
>>OK, I'm lost. I've never had a Wizard, having philosophical objections to a
>>machine that has a computer in it that you can't get to, so I'm not familiar
>>with HOW the Wiz' apps are better. I find the phone book and appointment
>>calendar perfectly usable, the keyboard is fine, and I only use the memo
>>editor for writing short notes to myself. (Bigger documents? That's what the
>>machine on my desk is for.) No outliner, unfortunately, but that can be
>>overcome.
>
>
>The Wizard's built-in apps are generally much more polished than the HP's
>apps.  For example, the calendar display looks more like a calendar than
>the HP's display, which basically just looks like a bunch of ASCII text.
>The Wizard would show you a really pretty bar graph of the day's
>appointments:  white where there were no appointments, grey where there were 
>appointments, and black where there was a conflict.  Little touches like that
>make a big difference to me (I also found the Wizard's display much
>easier to read.  It looked like black-on-white rather than blue-on-green).
>The thing I really liked about the memo and outliner was that you accessed them
>by content rather than by some arbitrary name and location in a filesystem
>(don't you hate having to pick a name and a directory for every little thing
>you want to jot down?).

Yes, little touches that like make HUGE difference.


>
>Nevertheless I ended up with an HP because I felt the advantages of the
>HP far outweighed the disadvantages.  For one thing, there's nothing stopping
>anyone (including myself) from writing *better* apps than the Wizard has.

We have to remember not everyone is a computer programmer.  Buying another 
piece of software does cost.

On the other hand, the open advantage (borrowing words from DEC ads) is 
precisely what helped change my mind about which system to use.

Neverthless, to this day, we do not have a good weekly view program.
(I am aware of the program WEEKABK.EXM 2.18).


>Lotus 123 blows away the Wizard spreadsheet (in features and performance)
>and the expense of the Wizard spreadsheet negates any cost advantage it
>may have had over the HP.  You can effortlessly switch applications on
>the HP whereas you couldn't always do that on the Wizard (in mid-sentence
>for example).  The HP calculator wipes the floor with the Wizard
>calculator.  The macro capability of the HP is wonderful. In *some* ways,

The macro capability is elementary.  If you define a macro key to save a file, 
and you are saving an unnamed file, what happens?  One of your current file 
gets deleted.  No wonder people invent AAAAAAAA.TXT to prevent such things 
from happening.  Very soon, you end up with many small size, meaningless files 
on your C: drive. :-)

>the HP keyboard is better, especially if you do a lot of calculations and
>you need a numeric keypad (the Wizard doesn't have one).  The infinitely-
>adjustable non-glare screen on the HP is much better than the 2-position 
>screen on the wizard which is prone to glare (although, as I mentioned, the 
>characters look sharper (no pun intended) on the Wizard).
>
>All these advantages to the HP are in addition to the obvious ones:  Much
>more memory for the price, expandability, DOS compatability, smaller size,
>larger display (twice as many lines), standard slot for expansion cards

I would like more lines (lines showing function keys can at least be 
optionally removed.
 
>(instead of proprietary), etc.
>
>--
>Steve Kanefsky
=================================================================
Mingfang Li
Department of Management, California State University, Northridge
Internet: MLI@VAX.CSUN.EDU
=================================================================
From: everett@hpcvra.cv.hp.com (Everett Kaser)
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 15:10:16 GMT
Subject: Re: pocket modems and the HP95LX
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, OR, USA