Portables

[J T]

I am curious to know how easy it is to type on these new touch screeny things, such as the iPad.

As you might expect, at first it is a little bit weird, but it is something that is quickly adjusted to. I doubt many people would want to use to to type an essay length piece of text, but for browsing/SMS/short emails the iphone is absolutely fine. I imagine the ipad is a bit better due to the larger screen size, but then the larger physical size may make it a bit tricker to hold (possibly needing a table or lap to pop it on for support, rather than hand holding).

For iphone/ipad you could of course substitute any number of touch screen devices. The apple screens are rather nice to look at and and to use, though.

[Stephen Coates]

I got an HP 100LX off ebay

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...m=200593537772

I look forward to getting it.

As it runs MS-DOS and has a proper keyboard it will probably be a lot more useful than the Newton Messagepad which I used to have.

[Harrison]

I remember those early Palmtop PCs. Quite expensive though for such an old and pretty obsolete piece of hardware. Do they normally go for that price? What are you going to use it for?

[Stephen Coates]

That seems to be a reasonable price. A 200LX sold the other day for about GBP60.

It has a PCMCIA slot and a serial port and is basically just a miniature PC/XT so I'm sure it will be useful for something .

[J T]

Can it run the Gorilla game in QBasic?

[Stephen Coates]

It arrived this morning. The words 'wow' and 'cool' spring to mind.

It should run Gorilla and Nibbles, but QBasic is not included on the machine. I would have to transfer it on using a serial cable, or maybe using the 1MB PCMCIA SRAM card, which needs its battery replacing.

I will have to find out whether a compact flash card will work.

[Harrison]

That 1MB SRAM card will also work in an Amiga A600/A1200 to add 1MB fast ram.