[access-uk] Re: Notetakers again
- From: "Brian Hartgen" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 13:24:28 -0000
Hi
The Pac Mate Omni does not suffer with the loss of data issue I can assure you.
I have been using one of these units since May of this year and in that regard
it is very reliable. You also get a longer battery life. Nothing has changed
on the Braille input front however.
I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll release a product called J-Pac which will
make the Braille much more logical to work with in terms of commands (smile).
Because you can script with the Pac Mate you can do absolutely anything with it
and I think it would be very easy to improve the structure. I love the Pac
Mate, it's a great product, but there are areas which could be improved upon.
Original Message -----
From: Jackie Cairns
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 12:01 PM
Subject: [access-uk] Re: Notetakers again
Hi Ari
Having used both BrailleNote (though not MPower) and Pac Mate, I can tell
you briefly my experiences with the two units. BrailleNote, as it used to
be in its classic format, was solid and robustly built. But my gripes with
it were, firstly, you couldn't work with true Word documents because they
were saved as RTF files and, therefore, caused formatting issues for me.
Secondly, I could overwrite on BrailleNote, which meant that as a very fast
Braillist, it was easy for me to trip it up in the middle of a shorthand
exam, causing the text to jump portions and land elsewhere in the document.
But Pac Mate had some horrendous issues that I couldn't stand, namely its
poor battery life, complicated chord structure, and loss of data. The
latter has been a real source of aggro for years, and is something that a
really close friend of mine is having hassle with on a daily basis.
If you take them at face value and use them simply as note-takers, I would
have to say that the Humanware product is more reliable and robustly built.
In some ways, I wish I'd not jumped ship to Pac Mate, thinking it would be
better to work with off-the-shelf software. It doesn't always work out that
way. At the time, BrailleNote didn't support Bluetooth and struggled with
the Internet and networking. I can't speak for the MPower as I've never
used it. But my sources tell me it really has stepped up a few gears since
the early 2000s.
If someone were to ask me what to go for now, I think I'd say think very
carefully what you need the device for, and go from there. BrailleNote
worked for me a treat at college to a point, but it dropped me right in it a
few times as well. But Pac Mate's problems are more serious and I wouldn't
recommend that family at all now, having found it out to my cost. I've had
my friend literally in tears on the phone because he's lost data at crucial
times during his work. He now has to save data on the internal flash memory
of Pac Mate, which is quite lousy. It has a known issue of resetting itself
at random, which causes everything you've saved to be lost. Yes, you could
use CF cards to overcome the problem, which I largely did, but it still
reset itself on me for nothing, and I felt like introducing it to the garden
via a closed window on many occasions (smile). Support for it isn't clever
either, and I'm only being honest.
Good luck.
Jackie
----- Original Message -----
From: "ari" <aridamoulakis@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 11:32 AM
Subject: [access-uk] Re: Notetakers again
> Hi Ian and Ray,
> Thanks for these, I just wish Humanware could offer some sort of trade in
> or something. About the braille sense, does anyone know what languages it
> can support or does it just support English? Also Ian, with the MPower, do
> you have to write in computer braille (which I've really not liked at
> all!)?
> Thanks
> Ari
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