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First Impressions of the HandEra 330: Part III

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In addition to the usual built-in applications and HandEra extensions like Backup and VoicePad, the 330 ships with a fully compatible registered version of QuickOffice including QuickSheet, QuickWord, and QuickChart. QuickSheet and QuickWord both support all eight 330 fonts and both landscape and portrait modes. A spreadsheet with the smallest font in landscape mode can show 13 lines at once with the graffiti area collapsed. Seeing this on the device is stunning; it really illustrates just how much extra real estate 320x240 pixels buys you.

HandEra also offers a graffiti area keyboard to 330 owners (coming soon). The keyboard comes in two varieties - small and large. On both keyboards, you can graffiti over the keyboards (but need to use a special key for the dot punctuation shift), and on both you can enter every supported character without any graffiti. Both have three different views - alphabetic, numeric, and special characters. Unlike the straight graffiti area, it is possible to turn off graffiti echo when a keyboard is enabled. You can also disable graffiti if you want.

The small keyboard fits between the normal silkscreen buttons. It includes keys for adjusting the contrast and volume, tasks normally accomplishes using small icons on the graffiti area. The large keyboard layout expands out into the area normally occupied by the silkscreen buttons. Small columns flank either side of the keyboard with smaller icons representing the normal silkscreen buttons and icons for adjusting volume and contrast. The actual keyboard layouts are similar but not the same. The large numeric keyboard is particularly nice, as it actually turns the numeric side of the graffiti area into a numeric keypad.

Third party applications that support the 330 are starting to appear, as are some hacks and applications specific to the 330. One nice hack specific to the 330 is SilkClockHack. This puts a very small date, time, memory, and battery meter along the top and bottom of the expanded graffiti area. It still displays the date and time when the graffiti area is minimized.

Mapopolis has released a version with HandEra support. That is a nice fit, as maps are one type of file where folks are constantly scrolling. Seeing more map at once is good. There are several Doc readers with 330 support including Aportis Doc and TealDoc (although I still like cspotrun and use it on the 330). PalmJPG lets you view JPG files from a CF card directly. It resizes the image for you automatically and will display in full screen mode. Being able to take a CF card directly from a digital camera, put it in the 330 CF slot, and see pictures is pretty amazing.

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