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Frevo Reviews > Psion Revo - Six Months On
Psion Revo Psion Revo - Six Months On
By Christopher Hurley

I've been using my Revo most days for six months now. It's been abroad, I've used it as my diary and portable entertainment machine and written reviews on it, so what have I thought of it during standard use?

The Revo certainly has made me more organised - I use the to-do lists in Agenda and alarms in Time in particular. The instant view of the week in Agenda is helpful as well.

The keyboard has also served me well. I can get up to decent typing speeds on it with only a few mistakes, which the spellchecker normally catches. The raised feeling to the key letters has worn off, but the letters themselves show no sign of disappearing. All of Frevo's reviews, including this one, have been typed into Word on my Revo and converted using PsiWin.

Although I haven't tried synchronisation with Outlook on my PC, since I use the Revo as my diary instead, file conversion has generally worked well. Backups are also quick, although they tend to unnecessarily copy soundfiles which haven't been modified. Very occasionally I can't connect properly to the Revo, requiring a reboot of Windows, but that generally cures the problem.

One thing I've discovered is that the screen attracts dust like nothing I've ever seen before, so I'm always needing to give it a wipe. Mine has even aquired one or two marks which seem to be permanant, although I have no idea how that happened. The screen has also aquired some minute scratches, but I'd expect this of something you drag a stylus across regularly.

The outer case has a couple of problems of its own, particularly getting scratched, which takes away a little of the paint on the silver section and requiring a change of the sticky-back plastic on the Revo logo. The underside used to mysteriously collect bits of white paint which don't appear to come from anywhere. The stylus has been fine, though - it hasn't snapped or got lost.

The actual build quality, though, is very good. My Revo has survived a fall down a flight of stairs, a half-a-metre drop onto a lino floor and several minor knocks without harm. I've heard horror stories about the screens of Palm and Windows CE computers being smashed after a drop of a few inches, but I've had no such problems.

Most of the programs have served me very well, and I've installed over 20 third-party ones, including about 5 that I never use! Data, however, has a bug - it crashes whenever I change to System and back if I'm editing an entry in some large databases. Word also seemed to crash occasionally when editing headers and footers, although I can't replicate this. While I'm complaining, the Revo seemed to take a few days to adjust to foreign power supplies and get trickle-charging working properly, but it worked it out eventually.

I have had one other problem elicting a soft reset and another which reset the Revo with a fanfare accompaniment without even closing programs, but these are minor errors which didn't cause any major disasters. Symbian EPOC, the Revo's operating system, has been very stable.

As for entertainment, puzzle or strategy games seem to be best - probably because the Revo has no joystick port and the keyboard isn't the best thing to play action games on. However, I have had Steve Litchfield's Atomic (Tetris) game on my Revo since about January and I've racked up a fairly good score, so some arcade games do work well.

On the whole, though, I've found the Revo extremely useful - having a powerful computer in your pocket has many advantages! It's replaced notepaper, my old 11KB Sharp databank, a calculator (mostly - the Revo cannot handle fractions well), a thesaurus and an alarm clock, as well as providing several functions which nothing portable I used before could do.

Its problems are minor - some may be fixed in a future release of EPOC - and I probably wouldn't be as organised without my Revo. I'm as happy with it now as I was when I first used it.

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