Toshiba Libretto
Two years ago, a friend showed me a Toshiba Libretto 30CT that he had purchased in Tokyo. It ran a Japanese version of Windows 3.11 with a DX/4 100 processor, and he ended up having to send away to Tokyo for the extra cost floppy disk drive in order to reinstall the Japanese version following a problem with installing an English version. The keyboard had Japanese characters, and battery life was severely restricted. Later models have been on sale in America, and now the 70CT and 100CT are available in the UK at relatively reasonable prices. Ever changing, in Japan Toshiba are due to launch the Libretto SS100, a super slim version of the P166 Libretto. My colleague at PC Pro, Jon Honeyball, has been intrigued enough to investigate the Libretto, and so have I.
The Libretto 100CT has a Pentium 166 MHx CPU, 32 Mb or RAM expandable to 64 Mb, a 2 Gb disk, and comes with a PC Card floppy drive, a mains power supply, and Windows 95 preinstalled. Battery life is about 90 minutes with the standard battery, although a larger capacity battery can be purchased. The keyboard is small, and compares poorly with the smaller Psion Series 5 keyboard; I would say that it is about as easy to use as the HP620LX keyboard, which is perfectly adequate for hunt and peck typists, but annoying for touch typists. Display quality is excellent on the 7.1" LCD colour display. A port replicator is also including in the basic package, which should be available for around 1,200 GBP + VAT. The expansion unit is required for access to a serial port or the VGA output socket. If you want to use the Libretto as a portable partner for a CE machine or a Pilot, you'll need to bring the port replicator with you, unless you use the ethernet network synchronisation capabilities of Windows CE (which of course will require two ethernet PC Cards, one for each machine, and a special crossover cable). For access to software on CDs, a separate CD-ROM player with PC Card is a useful extra.
An excellent partner for the Libretto is the Psion Dacom Gold card; Psion Dacom make a model that packages ethernet, analog modem, ISDN, and GSM in one card, which really does cover all the options. A very compact option for some users would be the Nokia CardPhone; this is a complete GSM phone in a PC Card package, with just a short lump on the end that sticks out of the card slot.
As a Windows 95 mobile machine, it has all the advantages and disadvantages of its operating system: short battery life, prolonged boot time, and a liking for continual but extended rebooting for minor reasons. For example, I can't unplug it from one network and connect it to a different one without rebooting or setting up a complicated routine involving multiple ethernet cards and a messy configuration.
The hibernation mode similarly takes longer than I would prefer, so it doesn't make a particularly good PDA. Which is fine; that isn't its purpose, as Toshiba's PR company have been at lengths to point out - they refused to supply one for review.
So why would anyone buy it? Being an electronic version of a Day Runner or Filofax, which is the commonest application for PDAs, is just one possible application, and I am not sure that it is the most important one. Because a PDA is something that can be kept by your side at all times makes this organiser function an important application, but few people really need every minute of the day managed for them, and we don't always have complicated to do lists or contact logs that have to come with us all the time. It's one application out of many, and some of us even have real personal assistants to carry this data around with us. A Pilot or REX is far better suited to this kind of application than Windows CE HPCs or a Libretto.
However, there is an area where it excels. A some months ago I spent a couple of hours listening to Steve Jobs telling an audience of 2,000 that the only application that interested him was email. He was using this as a reason to say that he didn't like Newtons, which I was using as my mail mobile email system at the time, which was incredibly ironic. Mobile communications is for many people a more important application than organisers. There are lots of gradations between these two applications: long email messages demand one solution, and short text messages (such as you get from a pager or an SMS package) are more suited to different packages. In the USA there are already several pager cards for the Pilot, which seems to be especially suited to this application. For more lengthy, leisurely emails, a good quality keyboard is the most requested feature. Windows 95 still has several features that let it score above Windows CE for this application: dial-up networking is scriptable, for a start, and you can read Microsoft Office files directly under Windows 95, rather than requiring your home based PC to convert attached files only when synchronising, as is the case with Windows CE. Total compatability with Office was the strongest reason that forced users to convert away from other desktop operating systems, and it applies just as strongly to mobile computing solutions.
So there is a strong case to be made for using a Libretto alongside either a Pilot or REX as the best and most complete mobile office solution; the Libretto for the hotel room or briefcase, and the Pilot in the pocket. As for myself, I'm using the Libretto for a completely different purpose: it runs Windows NT (very well, I might add), a database server and a web server, and I'm using it as a demonstration machine for customers to see the WebObjects systems that my company develops. It has excellent shock value.
Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: August 10, 1998