IP: Two new gadgets and one silly program

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

The new gadgets are:


The Franklin REX PRO. It will be officially announced on Tuesday and is a winner. I have used it for three months. The 
REX is a PCCARD size device that has a small but excellent display and has available appointments, memos, phone numbers 
, alarms etc. It goes into a PCCard slot and PIMS like Sidekick and others well support it. The original Rex was read 
only to the user. The new one allows through very cleaver use of its small keys for one to enter appointments, numbers, 
mark to-do lists etc. There are only a small number of keys on the device but they are adequate for the vast majority 
of bookkeeping tasks you would want to do. The info you put into the Rex Pro gets synched with your notebook and using 
Sidekick you can keep a notebook, Rex and Pilot all syched up. 


Strongly worth looking at. It fits in a small pocket and is always with me -- sometime  almost forget to take it out of 
a bathing suit.


Second gadget is the Bellsouth new Interactive Pager . It is a two way pager with a cleaver keyboard and belt clip 
arrangement that makes the package almost the size of a normal one way pager. The old 2 ways were big and floppy, this 
one is slim and useful. Software is very good and flexible. It uses the RAM data network and rather good metro coverage 
with national roaming. Well worth also looking at Bellsouth Wireless sells it I have had it for about 1 month and use 
it regularly. Only downer is 4 to 6 day battery life -- that may be a function of my use in marginal areas.


Third software gadget is CD Streamer. It reads a track on a CDROM music disk and converts it into a variety of Real 
Audio which you can then play without the disk. Unfortunately due to their weird interpretation of personal use 
copyright, the track will ONLY play on the machine that converted it. So using a desktop to convert it with hope of 
moving it to a notebook to play is NON USEABLE. Repeated attempts to try to talk to them about the illogic of that , 
and I talked with the president, got me a non responsive and non informative NO WE DON'T ALLOW THAT. I would avoid the 
product till they let me worry re personal use proof and let it operate on another machine. What one does if you 
replace your computer is not at all clear.