Amstrad Pen Pad PDA600

In 1993, Amstrad made an attempt at computerising the filofax – remember those thick paper notepads with diary and address book sections that were so popular amongst yuppies. It’s only input method is by handwriting recognition, and it wasn’t that good at it, although for the time it wasn’t terrible. It did make entering data tedious though.

The Pen Pad, like the NC100 and NC200, was another gadget that Amstrad slapped the User Friendly logo onto. Unlike the NC machines, it might not have been quite so deserving of it. All input is through the resistive touch screen via the included pen (a couple of spares were also included).

Power to the Pen Pad is provided by three AA alkaline batteries. There is no external power input. The memory, like many of it’s contemporaries, requires power to be kept alive rather than the flash storage in modern devices. This is provided by a CR2032 cell.

On the back, as well as the battery compartments, is a clip holder for the stylus. It’s oddly shaped, almost hemispherical, which gives it a strange feeling. It isn’t terrible, just odd.

In the box are a couple of spares in case you lose one. It’s a fairly robust clip, so you’d have to be quite deliberately careless to lose one.

By default, the Pen Pad has 128K of memory. The manual says this gives about 300 full addresses or 6,000 diary entries. You can expand this with a PCMCIA RAM card. Only cards up to 2Mb can be used.

One final feature of the Pen Pad is the serial port. It’s a simple set of 1/10th of an inch pins, (similar in size and spacing to those of a floppy disk drive, or the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi). Electrically it’s compatible with RS-232, and the manual explains how to wire up your own cable. It doesn’t tell you anything about the software protocol though.

The Pen Pad was an obvious attempt by Amstrad to create a skeuomorphic electronic filofax.

Skeuomorphism is an attempt to recreate something maintaining design cues from that which it replaces (Wikipedia has a page on it).

When first started, the Pen Pad requests the time and date, touch screen calibration and then requires that every letter and number be written out (in upper- and lowercase). Each has to be written within it’s own box – all character entry is done like this. It’s quite time consuming. Even though you’ve done all this, you’ll probably need to correct many entries – you can do this with up to four variations of each. It’s recognition does get better as you do this more and more, but it’s far from perfect. What’s really irritating is that there is no on-screen keyboard! All entry has to be hand written. The touch screen is very responsive though.

Not surprisingly, the Pen Pad software is all designed around simple filofax functionality.

Tapping on the topmost tab takes you to the Address Book. It’s pretty unremarkable. You only have a fixed set of fields that you can use: name, address, four different phone numbers and other information. Names get filed under first letter for quick access, you can move between entries one at a time and you can perform a free text search (from the Search icon under the Desk button at the top).

The second tab takes you to the diary.

At first glance, the diary is very simple. You can place entries under a specific time on a specific date and you can add scribbled notes at the bottom of a day’s entries.

You can add repeating entries or anniversaries (or birthdays etc.) from one of the Desk items (see below). There are no alarms on diary entries though.

The to-do list is next on the tabs.

You need to specify a date against each to-do. This date will then be used to provide a note on that day’s diary page which you can tap on to get that to-do entry.

As always for these things you can tap to tick the item off.

On the diary page, only the text “To Do” is shown.

The fourth tab down on the right can be tapped to take you to a blank page on which you can scribble to your hearts content.

You can remove and throw away the page when done, or you can switch to the eraser to delete lines you have drawn.

Another page can be added or you can switch between pages.

The bottom-most tab takes you to the information screen – this is what the manual calls it but it’s really just a units converter.

This doesn’t really warrant a tab of its own – I think there are better candidates, like the calculator. Maybe they were going for another skeuomorphism – filofaxes tended to have a couple of pages at the back for conversion tables and such.

At the top are a set of fixed buttons: contrast, new page, calculator, desk, erase, previous and next page.

It’s one of the few features that doesn’t require you to enter data (in this case numbers) with handwriting.

The only feature that this calculator has is a memory. It doesn’t even do square root or %age.

The last remaining button is the Desk button. This brings up a menu of a few utilities and settings. These are: set time, set anniversary (appears in diary), set line thickness, view world times, gauges (memory and battery usage), card operations, set date, set repeating diary appointments, send or receive over the serial port, search, set alarms, Organiser (settings page).

The settings, known as the Organiser in the manual, allows you (in turn) to: change your handwriting style (just like at startup); set the date (tediously by month) but not the time (that’s done from the top Desk menu); recalibrate the touch screen; set the owner’s name and telephone number; set whether to start from the beginning every time you switch the pen pad on, or resume where you left off; and finally, set the language.