Retro PDA - Better Than I Remember
I recently started digging around the retro electronic organiser scene. I’ve thus far been unable to find my old Sharp IQ-7000 but I have found some interesting tech floating around on eBay for really low prices.
For example, this Sharp ZQ-5200 barely cost a tenner! So I figured I’d give it a punt and I think I’m in love! It’s fantastic and works so well.
Let’s be honest here, when I say it works ‘so well’, I’m saying that with an eye on the fact that I was expecting it to be something of a disappointment. But it’s not and while it can’t touch your iPhone or Android for sheer power, when it comes to simplicity and surprisingly useful features, this bad boy puts up a reasonable show before fading back into the mist of the past.
But, let me just say that this device, released in, what, nineteen ninety something has copy & paste. Not even the iPhone had that when it launched for crying out loud.
But this is proving itself to be very functional and addictive coming armed, as it is, with an entire 64Kb of storage built in!
So what use is it? Let’s take a look...
Calendar
The calendar gives you a month view from the off with a two dots on each day to indicate where there’s an event in the morning and/or afternoon. You navigate to your date by using cursor keys (no touch screen smudge marks on this thank you very much) and then you press the Calendar key to dig into the data and show you the week.
The week view allows you to select the day (with the one you previously selected being active by default) and then you press calendar again - this takes you to a day view.
The day view gives you a scrollable view of all the events you have that day with a line that shows you which part of the day it is effective.
I really like that, I think it’s simple, clear, quick and effective. There’s no fuss about colour coded blocks that squish an event so tight that the font is the only thing that could stand a chance of creeping out of the proverbial duck’s back passage - this is clear and concise.
Using the cursor keys again I can select an individual event and press Schedule. Now the full details of that scheduled item is there for me to see.
I can have an alarm, time from and to and a couple of screen-fulls of text.
What I can’t have is a repeating event or even a multi-day event. That’s a slight draw back which Sharp has tried to manage by making schedules easy to copy and paste to other days, but it’s not perfect. However, for a simple summary of what’s to come, this is magnificent.
Telephone/Address Book
You get three individual address ‘books’ which are called TEL 1, TEL 2 and TEL 3 but you can rename these to something like Personal, Business etc.
Each book is pretty basic with name, telephone number and address fields. However, the address field is pretty free-form and you can use this to enter as much detail as you like about alternative numbers, email addresses and so on.
There are no active fields for you to tap on here because there’s no connectivity, you just enter the data and it’s there for you to open it up and read.
Memo
This memo is certainly no Evernote or OneNote but it does have some neat little features which, again, one would hardly have expected in a not-smart device from the ‘olden days’.
You can type your text as you like. The CAPS key turns on your lower case and UPPER CASE text. It’s not intuitive to use when there’s also a SHIFT key that you use to access accents.
I find it easier to just type in full caps.
There’s no word-wrap, spell check, auto correct or any of the other niceties that have made today’s society so soft and entitled. But there is a facility for you to mark numeric values for later calculation. What that means is that I can (for example) type in a list of things that I bought, put in their prices and then when the time comes, the organiser will sum them up for me.
That’s nice.
You can password protect individual memos (as you can almost anything you enter into the organiser) though I wouldn’t expect it to be ultra secure so I wouldn’t put any passwords in there.
As far as retrieving memos is concerned, you can scroll sequentially, search by first letter and you can search by keyword.
Do List
The last feature I want to mention is to Do List.
This keeps catching me out because I keep looking for the To Do List but the Do List sounds far more commanding and authoritative.
I kind of like this but it has limited value.
You can create tasks (or Do List items) and record a due date, manager and project. You can then enter your text but as far as I can see there’s no way to actually say that you’ve done a piece of work, there’s also no alerts to let you know a Do List item is due to be done.
This leads me to think that I’d may as well use a memo field and put a x for any item I’ve managed to complete.
The only way you can view the items in any kind of managed order is by going to the Reports and ‘printing’ a report to the display in order/grouping by deadline, manager, priority or project. Once the display is on the screen you can scroll through the entries but you can’t open them, you need to go back into the Do List function to do that. Not only that but you can only see the first 256 Do List items!
Other Functions
There are other things which vary in usefulness such as Expense recording, calculator (and the Paperless printer mode in the calculator is pretty cool).
On my unit, the ‘User Dic’ is borked (sounds painful) but this is possibly fixed in later firmware.
Conclusion
On the whole, I really like this and am using it daily to manage my stuff. This is either because I want to go more off-line as Big-Tech acts more and more authoritarian against people’s lives, or for the sheer novelty of using old tech in a modern world - I haven’t quite yet decided what my motive is there.
But since eBay seems littered with such devices as these, many of them for less than twenty quid - some even less than a tenner - despite them costing many times more than that in their day, I don’t think you can go too wrong.
I have two more on the way, another Sharp and a Casio, each of them dirt cheap, so watch this space, there may be more to come.
And one more thing...
If you do buy one of these off eBay, check the daily alarm. I did and found that the seller had set the alarm to go off twice first thing in the morning.
Very naughty but since he lives on a remote Scottish island, I’ll just put it down to someone getting his laughs where he can get them.