The Revo is, luckily, fitted with a good keyboard, and this makes entering quite a bit of text easy and quick. Non-keyboarded palmtops often use handwriting recognition,and Scribble by Nicklas Larsson is a freeware package designed for this purpose on the Revo, and other EPOC computers.

Scribble floats in either a large or a small window over the current program - I found the large version easier to work with. You can drag the window around the screen, provided that you do so slowly, otherwise you tend to 'lose' the window as you move the stylus across the screen.

The Scribble alphabet is, apparently, somewhat similar to the Palm's Graffiti(TM), although I've never used a Palm myself. It is interpreted character-by-character and using its own special writing method. It doesn't recognise more than one letter at a time or anything that is too far away from its defined strokes.

As for actually writing, let me say this: do not try writing anything of any length with Scribble. I wrote the first paragraph of this review in Scribble and you do tend to get very tired of this quickly. Don't expect to be able to write nearly as fast as you can normally on paper. You could probably get faster, as I've only used Scribble for a day, but I managed about eight words per minute whereas my typing speed on the Revo is around 30-40 words per minute, about half that of my full-size keyboard speed. Using any sort of keyboard will almost always be quicker.

Analysis of what you have written is quick, and accuracy isn't too poor, provided that you use the correct alphabet. The following sentence, intended to be 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', was written in Scribble without correcting errors or unrecognised letters:

The quick brwn fox jums over tke laz p

This is a 'worst case' scenario - I wrote whilst going along the road in a bus, so writing at a desk or on a table would probably be more accurate. The letters I have had particular problems with are O and Q, as Q often takes three or four tries to be recognised and O can take dozens if you don't write in the right way, which appears to be by either filling the entire box or smaller but perfectly circular, both of which being difficult to accomplish.

A few useful letters are absent from the alphabet, as there is no exclamation or question mark, dash, hyphen, colon, semicolon or brackets. Still, this is a beta release, so there is still possibility for improvement.

Scribble isn't bad at what it does, but its main use - writing in the dark with the backlight on - isn't a use at all on the Revo, due to its lack of backlight. It remains a great gimmick, but doesn't really have any practical use on the Revo. If non-keyboarded Psion machines are released, though, this could be an interesting alternative to whatever is released as the standard input system.