Here I'm going to do a quick comparison between the builtin apps of the Ericsson MC218 and the Asus A730W. Just a reminder, the MC218 is basically the same as the Psion S5a but with a few extra Ericsson-only applications thrown in (some of these extras are built into the ROM whilst others are installed separately).
Wordprocessing: Epoc Word vs Pocket Word
In a nutshell Epoc Word is a full featured word processor with sophisticated features (for a pda) and can be a competent substitute to your desktop wordprocessor. Here is a list of its most salient features:
- headers and footers, page numbers - sophisticated character/paragraph formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikeout, text colour, background colour, borders, aligment, spacings, indents, bullets - styles to manage your formatting - templates - print preview (you can even select the number of thumbnail pages!) - print directly to an attached printer (requires an optional printer interface) - print to a printer attached to the desktop via Epoc Connect (that is Epoc's equivalent to WinCE's ActiveSync) - can embed Sheet documents (ie spreadsheets) and Sketch documents (ie images). NB these embedded documents will display and print as part of the Word document. Heck, a picture is worth a thousand words - see screenshots! - tables, by embedding a Sheet document, bit of a kludge but works well for simple tables
Epoc Word document with an embedded image
Epoc Word document with an embedded chart from a spreadsheet
In comparison, Pocket Word is little more than a glorified text editor - glorified, because you can change the character formatting. Can't really think of much more to say Conclusion, Pocket Word is utter crap compared to Epoc Word. Actually Pocket Word does have one feature that Epoc Word doesn't have, and that is the ability to insert the current date into the document, however this minor feature can easily be implemented using the fabulous Macro5 utility. I'll talk more about Macro5 at a later date.
Spreadsheet: Epoc Sheet vs Pocket Excel
The features between the two are more evenly matched. Pocket Excel has in its favour the ability to sort, and being able to use more than a single sheet/page per document. Whilst Epoc Sheet has the ability to produce graphs and charts of your data, and in common with most of the builtin apps, the ability to print.
For Epoc Sheet, the ability to do crude sorting can be implemented by using the excellent Macro5 utility.
In conclusion, Epoc Sheet is the more rounded and better featured of the two.
Time and alarms
The Epoc Time application has a database of most of the world's major cities (certainly all the capital cities) allowing you to set your timezone precisely. If your city is not listed you can easily add one or more of your own. The cities information includes the international dialling code for the country and for the city itself as well the longitude and latitude and from this the sunset and sunrise times. It also allows you to easily specify whether a zone (Northern hemisphere, Southern hemisphere, Europe) is in "Summer Time" (DST) and adjusts all times accordingly.
Epoc Time allows for a total of 8 alarms. Some neat features are the ability to see how long there is to the next alarm (how many days, hours, minutes), and to be able to see what the previous alarm was.
WinCE (I'm going to be using WinCE as the all encompassing term for all the variations of WinCEs, Handheld PC, PPC, WM2003, and whatever fancy title of the day that M$ decides to come up with next) does not have a World Time app at all - it only has a crude (some would say crud) timezone setting.
Database
The MC218 comes with the incredibly useful Epoc Data application. It is a simple flat-file database system offering user defined fields and supports the following field types:
- Text (up to 250 characters) - Number (integer) - Floating point - Date - Yes/No - Memo (unlimited - well not exactly, but very large nevertheless, I think it's 16MB, and seeing as the MC218 only has 16MB of RAM you're very unlikely to reach the limit)
The real power of Epoc Data is its ability to embed other documents - Word, Sheet, Sketch and Record (voice notes) - into any Text or Memo field. And for the icing on the cake, Text and Memo fields are rich text aware so the full range of character formatting can be applied to the text within.
Conclusion,