Sony conjures up a new standard in PDAs with the help of Magic Cap
Peter Wayner
For the last several years, the computer industry has flirted with the notion of a palm-size computer able to communicate with the world. Companies like Sharp, Tandy, and Apple have offered versatile portable hardware that hasn't yet lived up to hype promising a computer that can nearly read people's minds. The latest stab at the promise is Sony Electronics'
Magic Link
Personal Intelligent Communicator. It's a $995 pen-based tablet that is the first device to use General Magic's
Magic Cap
object-oriented software environment and Telescript remote programming language.
Connect Magic Link to a phone line, and you can place voice calls, send faxes, or log onto America
Online. Receiving SkyTel pages is an option. Most important, Magic Link connects to AT&T's new Telescript-enabled PersonaLink Services, which supports Magic Cap E-mail messages enriched with sound, audio, and penned electronic ink, as well as Telescript agents for automating tasks like filtering and forwarding messages or exchanging address information.
Sony's new unit won't yet satisfy everyone's dreamy cravings for the perfect PDA (personal digital assistant). It is, however, a useful portable computer for managing basic E-mail and other communications.
Compact Communicator
The Magic Link is a 7.5- by 5.2-inch charcoal-gray tablet encased in rubberized plastic, with a 480- by 320-pixel, touch-sensitive, black-and-white display screen. The 1.2-pound package is well thought out and graced with several intelligent touches. The screen stylus, for example, stows completely inside the PDA itself--a big improvement over designs that leave you no secure place to park it. There i
s also a clever plastic shield that prevents you from changing the regular batteries and the lithium back-up battery at the same time.
A major difference between Sony's PDA and others on the market is that Sony designed the rectangular screen to be held horizontally instead of vertically (landscape mode as opposed to portrait). This makes it slightly more challenging to hold the Magic Link in one hand and write with the other, but the horizontal arrangement mirrors what I'm used to on desktop systems.
The film-resistive screen responds to both finger touch and stylus. As a simple LCD without backlighting, it isn't revolutionary. People accustomed to the crisp, bright colors of an active-matrix display won't enjoy using Magic Link's screen, but until new display and battery technology come along, PDA users will continue to trade some readability for portability.
Sony claims that with the right usage the Magic Link's optional lithium-ion rechargeable battery ($69.95) will last for 10 to 12
hours on one charge. I was able to get 7 hours with continuous use. Magic Link can also run on six standard AAA batteries (included) for up to 3 hours.
Outside of the screen, most of Magic Link is devoted to connectors for linking the PDA with the outside world. There is an external port for attaching an optional keyboard ($129.95) with almost full-size keys. It fits together smoothly with Magic Link to make a laptop PC. You can also enter text by tapping the stylus on a keyboard displayed on the screen. Unlike Apple's MessagePad (aka Newton), the system software doesn't attempt handwriting recognition with pen input.
The primary communication port is an RJ-11 phone connector that attaches Magic Link to a standard phone line. The port connects the internal modem (only 2400-bps data and 9600-bps send-only fax). Magic Link can dial and log your calls, but doesn't work as a speaker phone, though it has a built-in microphone and speaker. It can work as a telephone, however, with the optional $79.95
headset.
Alas, there are no cellular connection options available, but SkyTel sent me one of its Sony-labeled paging cards, a $249.95 option available from Sony that slips into the Magic Link's PCMCIA slot. You can receive pages or short messages anywhere in the country with SkyTel's service. The device is well integrated with the Magic Cap, and incoming pages appear as messages in the E-mail system. You can arrange for E-mail received at your PersonaLink mailbox to be routed to you immediately through the pager. This service is customizable (through Telescript agents), and you can arrange for filters to ship only messages from selected people. The paging system is unidirectional only, but SkyTel promises future two-directional capability.
The right side of the Magic Link accepts the batteries and a single Type II PCMCIA card like the SkyTel pager. Sony also sells 1-MB memory cards ($219.95) that you can use for downloading important information. This is a good idea because Magic Link's main mem
ory is small, with 512-KB RAM allocated for storage and 512-KB RAM for temporary work. (The lithium backup battery protects only the storage area.)
You might also want the $99.95 kit that attaches the Magic Link to a Windows-based PC so you can transfer files. To transfer files between Magic Links, you can use the built-in 38.4-Kbps infrared link.
Under Magic Cap
While Sony created the hardware, Magic Link owes its personality to the Magic Cap software environment, developed by General Magic (Mountain View, CA). This software won't be limited to just the Magic Link; General Magic plans a version of Magic Cap that will run as an application on both Macintosh and Windows-based systems in 1995.
Magic Cap is an object-oriented, multitasking applications environment that extends the desktop metaphor to even more literal levels. You can use the stylus to click in and out of rooms, corridors, and even buildings. At the highest level is a street with buildings representing
the major software packages. The basic unit comes with three buildings: your home, America Online, and PersonaLink. To link up with the outside world, you go to the appropriate building. To use your own files and the bundled desktop apps, you go to your home.
The corridor in your house is the next level down in the abstraction. Rooms off of this corridor are your office (in which you'll find Intuit's Pocket Quicken, Penware's PenCell spreadsheet, a spell checker, datebook, notebook, and calculator), a storage room, the library, and a game room. Each room allows you to do pretty much what you would expect. The library's on-line documentation is adequate. The control room lets you fiddle with parameters like the amount of idle time before the machine turns itself off.
If you buy new software (or download it), it might appear as either a new item in a room, a new room on your hallway, or a new building on the street. The multiple levels of hierarchy are an improvement over the current popular deskt
op metaphors. Some people might argue that the differences between the rooms and the street are just window dressing, and they're correct, but I've found it a bit easier to navigate around the Magic Cap world with this additional gloss of metaphor.
The object-oriented structure makes possible some levels of customization. If you've turned on Magic Cap's ``construction'' mode, you can drag a class of visual objects called ``stamps'' around the Magic Cap world and leave them wherever you want. For example, you can place a stamp of a big pair of lips on your desk and it will speak when you touch it. This is how you can use the built-in microphone to leave verbal reminders or voice annotations in various places in the Magic Cap environment or include them in E-mail messages.
Some stamps control the Magic Link's actions. If you want a message to go via a particular communications network, you attach the appropriate stamp to the message and fill in the address. There are stamps for the Internet, X.400
, American Online, and many other networks. You can also place stamps on the address cards in your Magic Link rolodex. When you want to address a letter, just copy the stamp over to the new outgoing message.
The stamp concept unifies this virtual world. Most objects are stamps, and the common way to modify anything you see is to add a stamp. One stamp, for instance, will lock a door. You can't open the door without typing in the password. Clever stamps can add significant functionality to the Magic Cap interface.
Telescript Agents
At the bottom of all the software layers is General Magic's agent-empowering network Telescript operating system. This technology promises to let people send executable programs called agents through the network. Although this capability has awesome potential, most people will notice it first as just making life a bit easier. For example, one of the first messages in my E-mail box came with a button that I could push to install new software. Once
I pushed it, the software installed and the button disappeared. Sure, I could have inserted a disk and typed ``install,'' but that's not as automatic nor as flexible.
It will be interesting to see how many people use all the programmable capabilities of Telescript. General Magic suggests that future software packages will let you do things like make reservations with a distant airline computer by encoding your date, time, and seat preferences in a little program that picks and chooses when it runs on the airline's computer. Encoding all of these choices in a single program saves the cost of shipping all of the intermediate information back and forth.
AT&T's PersonaLink provides a few other nice agent capabilities. By contacting to PersonaLink's central computers, I managed to find the address of a friend who had purchased his own Magic Link. The response was an address card with the right network address that Magic Cap automatically inserted in my rolodex. Because we both had Magic Cap systems,
we were able to exchange several cards highlighted by scribbles and multiple animated stamps. Otherwise, E-mail is limited to text only. More agents should become obvious once AT&T opens up its Market Square virtual shopping mall on PersonaLink. AT&T promises that a mall filled with such stores as Land's End and Tower Records will be on-line early this year.
All Together
Sony has packed Magic Link with all the capabilities that the laws of physics, battery life, and its design budget will allow. It's attractive and relatively rugged but could easily use more memory and a better screen. The well designed Magic Cap software is a pleasure to use, and the included applications are solid enough to handle daily chores.
You won't want to write anything longer than three paragraphs without the keyboard, but you might be quite happy to keep it on your desk to handle your communications. You'll be even happier if you spend time on the road and need something to juggle messages, fax
es, and phone numbers. The combination of PersonaLink, the pager option, and the Magic Cap operating environment make this one of the best integrated packages for keeping it all together.
About the Product
Magic Link Personal Intelligent Communicator $995
Sony Electronics Inc.
1 Sony Dr.
Park Ridge, NJ 07656
(800) 556-2442
photo_link (44 Kbytes)
Magic Link runs a 16-MHz Motorola 68349 processor and holds the Magic Cap operating system in its 4-MB ROM. Options include the keyboard and headset shown.
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Magic Cap's interactive metaphor includes your office desktop, other rooms in your home, and the street outside.
Peter Wayner is a BYTE consulting editor. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
pwayner@bix.com
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Agent-Enhanced Communicator
