This information may help many professionals who have a lot of document reading to do. Lawyers, Students, Actors and of course Doctors come to mind.
First off, let's go through the motions of this and what I found to be the most useful:
1. Getting the document into the lifedrive:
o The Lifedrive doesn't crash if you install the document
onto the lifedrive itself. However, it is faster to save
it in memory. Equally as fast is if you use an SD Ultra
II card. It reads from this as though from internal
memory.
o Secondly it helps if the file is in a word format. I am
lucky to be in a place that is very tech savvy in this
regard.
2. Which program to use once it's there:
Well, I have two programs that I use now. Although I have
heard that Wordsmith is one of the best for .doc files, I
have not used it. I have also not used QuickOffice, which
has received great reviews. But here are my thoughts on
the the two that I do use:
o Documents to Go.
This comes standard with the Lifedrive. Apart from some
early crashes, the upgrade (*a) to it appears to make it
very stable. It loads .doc files very quickly and appears
to navigate equally as fast.
However, for reading some docs, it has several drawbacks.
First, it's default setting appears to be ALL BOLD and the
fonts are too large. It doesn't feel "natural" to read a
document. I found myself having to manipulate the document
to make it readable. Thus, I was never certain whether
certain aspects of the document were important or not. I
felt no continuity or naturality (is that a word?) as I
read it. It was as if a computer just opened the document
and everything was there to be read.
In defense of Dataviz however, once the fonts are changed
there is better readability.
o Mobisystems Office.
Mobisystems offered immediate opening of a document without
queries. The original .doc document opened flawlessly and
appeared as original as the printed copy. The feel of the
reading experience was as close to reading the document on
paper as one could have. I actually flew through it,
highlighting areas and saving versions of the document
(as redundancy is always the key to medicine). I could scroll
through the document at will and I knew exactly where I was at
all times. The bookmark feature was also flawless.
If there is a drawback with Mobi's version it is the slowness
in loading. Whereas, Dataviz loaded the document in about 10
secs, it took Mobi 30-45 seconds to load and render. After
that, things worked out very well. Another small drawback is
the fact that the font files are over 200k each, so that
rendering and formatting comes at a price if you don't have a
lifedrive.
Additionally, I have not been able to use the print function
with Mobi yet. It works well with Dataviz's product. I am
certain that may be an issue with the network though.
I have been told that it is possible to load the entire Office
suite onto an SD card. I recommend an ULTRA card if possible
and I will try this soon to see if this works.
Overall, the better program in regards to naturally reading a document was Mobisystems Office. It was actually "fun" to read. And Mobi's very intuitive, Explorer like loading-file window is the best I have ever seen on a Palm device. It even has an area for network files.
3. Advice on Storage:
If you can, I really recommend the ULTRA SD cards for storage. I purchased a Sandisk Ultra II card recently and I have to tell you programs, podcasts, files operate as though they were in memory. It is that fast! It is like having 1 gig of Ram. In terms of storage, I use the Lifedrives' 3.8 g's to just store the files. That seems to work. But always, always, always let redundancy be your guide. Back up and copy everything, especially if it is really important.
LDD.
(*a) Upgrade to Documents to go if it constantly crashes. This answers the memory leak probem:
http://support.dataviz.com/support.srch?DocID=13122http://support.dataviz.com/support.srch?DocID=13122
No comments:
Post a Comment