I fired up the old Zoomer PDA last night, to see if it was really as bad as I remembered it. It was actually worse than I remembered.

The batteries had died, of course, including the backup battery that was supposed to preserve the memory when the main cells ran out of power. So all of my documents and third-party programs were gone, including the Graffiti handwriting recognition system that I'd added, meaning I had to use the default recognition system.

Now, Graffiti was excellent, because rather than trying to interpret many different variations on the way a character could be written, it required the user to use its alphabet, which was specially designed so that each letter and number was distinct from the others. This made for really fast and accurate recognition, and Graffiti is in fact the kernel around which the PalmOS was designed.

The default Zoomer recognition system, on the other hand, was pathetic. It took about three seconds to recognize a single letter; a whole sentence took up to fifteen seconds to convert into text (and it usually only got about half of the letters right). Switching applications seemed to take forever; even calling up an application's help screen took about five seconds.

On the other hand, it did have a nice big screen -- 3 times the number of pixels the Palm models offer. Still, given a choice between speed and screen real estate, speed will win in my book every time.