| ★ HARDWARE ★ LES PC D'AMSTRAD ★ AMSTRAD PC - NC 100 ★ |
AMSTRAD PC - NC 100 (Amstrad Action) | AMSTRAD PC - NC 100 (Practical Electronics) |
Protext fans ahoy! How often have you wished your CPC was portable so that you could write while on the move? Well Amstrad's new NC100 Notepad isn't a CPC, but it's the next best thing. ROD LAWTON finds himself on some familiar ground... The whole philosophy behind the NC100 is simplicity. Right from the foreword to the manual (written by Alan Sugar himself) to the easy-peasy main menus you go through when you switch the machine on. Once you're using a program, most of the commands are accessed via keyboard shortcuts... but what's this? A menu key to the right of the spacebar will call up a list of possible commands at any one time. The LCD display is blue-on-green and. although it doesn't have a backlight feature (that would do horrible things to battery life), it's clear enough and easy to read. What is good is that the word processor displays bold text, for example as bold and italics as italics! It's not a truly WYSIWYG (What Vou See Is What You Get!) display, but it goes a long way towards it. For such a reasonably-priced (read 'cheap') machine, the NC 100's keyboard really is excellent. It's far better than than on the Cambridge Z88 (it's main rival), heaps better than the CPC464's, loads better than the 6128's and miles better than the Plus's. In other words, it's just about the best keyboard we've used. Batteries are expensive things, and nobody who's ever forked out for a pack of Duracells will relish the prospect of doing it regularly. Fortunately, the NC100 can squeeze an amazing 60 hours of use out of one set! Even if you use standard zinc/carbon batteries, you should expect to get about 20 hours. There is also a RAM back-up battery which is good for two years, even when the main batteries are exhausted. That should give you long enough to get a new set, we think... Word processor Loading up the word processor from the main screen is dead easy. Just follow the on-screen instructions, pressing the yellow and red keys together, and you're given a new document to start typing into. (The screen obligingly tells you to 'start typing here' - are potential owners really that simple?) From here on in, things look very familiar. Isn't that a very Protext-like text ruler we see at the top of the page? It certainly is. A little detective work reveals that much of the software for the machine was written by Arnor. In fact the word processing software really is Protext, albeit without the command-line. (It's like being in editing mode all the time.) Many of Protext's special commands can be carried out from the Edit mode anyway, and on the NC100 keyboard commands take care of any function you need to carry out. What about saving and loading files when you haven't got a disk drive? Well, first of all, you don't have to save files at all. The machine's RAM is also its storage system - all you're doing when you Save a document on the CPC is transferring it from the RAM to a disk. On the NC100 it just stays in the RAM. So when you decide you've done enough typing, just switch off! When you switch the machine on again you get the Main Screen. Select the word processor and you will get the option to start a new document, list the existing ones or print a document. Your document will be on the list - guaranteed! In many ways (this is the main one) the NC100 is a darned sight simpler to operate than a conventional computer - the documentation and the machine's design are already pitched heavily towards the computing novice. Protext (the CP/M version) comes with a spellchecker - and so does the NC100. It's stored in the machine's in-built ROM and uses a massive 48,000-word spellchecker. The usual options apply: Lookup, Store, Ignore and Edit. As well as checking your spelling at the end of a typing session you can also look up words as you go along. The best thing about this word processing software, though (perhaps we'd better not keep calling it Protext), is that you can also write 'macros' (automated sets of keypresses that stop you having to type them over and over again). And you can also insert a wide variety of 'stored commands' (listed in an appendix at the back of the manual) to control margins, layouts and printing - just like, er, Protext, in fact.
Why oh why did Cambridge Computer bother putting a calculator on the Z88? Who on earth is going to use a dirty great A4-sized machine to do sums on when they can use something the size of the credit card? The same criticism can be levelled at the NC100 A Calculator function is, of course, an extra selling point, but apart from making the adverts look good it is, arguably, a waste of time. Admittedly, in Calculator mode the NC100 displays huge numbers you could see a mile off -much better than the tiddly characters normally used. But ordinary calculators are still much easier to use - and this despite the fact that the NC100 has a special cluster of 'number' keys picked out in green for quicker calculating. The system doesn't work at all well, and it makes the keyboard much more cluttered and confusing. Diary/dock/address book The NC100 stores the correct time even while the machine is switched off. But you'll have to set it initially when you take the machine out of the box. From then on, the NC100 works like one of those wonderful little electronic organisers that you can slip in your jacket pocket. Mind you, if you can slip the NC100 into your jacket pocket you should change your tailor. The Diary/Clock/Address Book software is accessed from the main screen by pressing the yellow and blue keys. You now get the choice of using the Address Book, the Calendar/Diary or the 'Time Manager1. The Address Book is really a card index-style database. It's pretty simple, but useful enough for storing names, addresses and telephone numbers. The Calendar/Diary option displays a whole month at a time, with dates on which you've made appointments marked with an asterix. To make a note for any particular day, just move the cursor to that date on the Calendar screen, then press Return. The Time Manager is a little more complicated. Choose this option and you get three more: Alarm, Edit Alarms, Set/Edit time zones. The NC100 has a decent enough little alarm and setting/cancelling it is pretty easy. The International Time Zones business looks very flashy, but few of us are jetsetting travellers, and fewer still would pack an NC100 on the trip. For most purposes this is just a bit of gloss (like the calculator - only more so). Interfaces Because the NC100 has no built-in disk drive, you're going to have to transfer documents by cable. To transfer stuff to your CPC (assuming you've already got an RS232 interface for the thing) you need to use the serial interface on the back of the Notepad. Unfortunately, it's one of the tiddly 9-pin plugs, but getting or making up a lead shouldn't be a problem. Once you've done that, transferring stuff is a doddle, thanks to the NC 100's built-in comms software. Most printers these days are worked via parallel interfaces, and the NC100 features a standard parellel port on the back for trouble-free connection. The machine won't just print to Epson-compatibles, though - it can also be set up to drive IBM 24-pins, Canon BJ10es (the rapidly emerging standard for bubble-jet printers) and Laserjets. There's more... Although the NC100 comes equipped with only 64K of RAM (which is quite adequate, actually), this can be expanded with memory cards. A slot in the left-hand side of the machine accepts industry-standard SRAM cards (JEIDA/PCMCIA cards) of up to 1Mb capacity! These not only allow the storage of much more data than the RAM alone could accomodate, they also provide the potential for non cable-based links with other machines which can use these cards. More immediately interesting, though, is a new 3.5-inch disk drive from Ranger Computers (the RangerDisk NC100 drive) which lets you swap files with PC-compatibles. Unfortunately, the RangerDisk costs £299, which is 50% more than the NC100! (Ranger Computers are on 0604 ******.)
The competition The Cambridge Z88 is about the most serious competitor for the NC100. Its rubber membrane dead-flesh-feel keyboard, although effective enough, is nothing like as good as the NC 100's, and the battery life is substantially worse. The Z88 doesn't have a back-up battery, either, which makes changing the main batteries a bit fraught (you've got about 45 seconds)! Finally, the Z88's built-in Pipedream software makes a much weaker word processor than that in the NC100. On the other hand... the Z88 is slimmer still than the Amstrad, it also has spreadsheet and database facilities, and the display is marginally clearer (although the characters are smaller). Basically, the NC100 wins by a country mile. With Protext built in plus BBC BASIC installed, it really is the closest thing yet to a portable CPC.  AA#87 |
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