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The Z88 has shed most of the outer trappings of "Pandora". It retains the cartridges and Z80 processor, but it has ended up with a liquid crystal display, bought in from the Japanese. The display is fairly clear, with dark blue letters on a grey background, but I wouldn't like to use it for long. It's very short and wide and the characters are much smaller than those of previous portable computers (like the Epsom HX-20 and the Tandy 100) It's quite good as LCD displays go, but it's still sluggish, 'dotty' and cramped. In view of his earlier comments, I have a suspicion that Sinclair doesn't like it much either.
The LCD screen rules out Spectrum compatibility at a stroke, with it's slow refresh rate and wide, short 64x640 pixel format. The word processor uses eight 80 column text lines, with margins containing a menu and a 'page map' showing the page layout, with one dot for each character.
The Sinclair deal with AMSTRAD has been suggested as another reason for the Z88's lack of Spectrum compatibility, but I think that argument should take second place to the practical considerations. The Z88 has no output for a conventional 'CRT' display and it seems unlikely that one will materialise - LCD and CRT display circuits have very little in common.
The Z88 weighs less than two pounds and is about the size of an A4 pad. It feels light, but sturdy. It runs on four Walkman batteries, apparently for 20 hours, with about a year's 'stand-by' power when you're not actually using the machine, but still want to retain it's memory contents. These are Sinclair's battery life figures, and anyone who has owned a C5, Black Watch or Cambridge programmable calculator will view them with suspicion.
The keyboard is weird in design, but quite easy to use in practice. It is a continuous sheet of plastic, with raised keys. The material at the side of each key is thin, so that only the key you press moves as you type. Although it seems simpler, I prefer this keyboard to that of the Spectrum Plus and the QL. It's silent, which is a bit disconcerting, but as usual Sinclair can think of a good reason for every deviation from normality - he points out that it's much easier to hear yourself think in a room full of Z88 owners than it is in a typing pool! I type for a living, and I'd be quite happy to use the Z88 keyboard - but this is a very subjective judgement, and I'd advise you to have a go before ordering a Z88, especially if you're already an experienced typist. Journalists that I've spoken to come out about 50:50 for and against the Z88 keyboard.
It seems that - as usual for a Sinclair machine - the Z88 has been launched long before it is ready. The prototype was running a neat Word Processor package, but the spreadsheet, database and diary software were nowhere to be seen. This software will have to be uncommonly reliable - there's not much point having batteries that can preserve data for a year if the software goes haywire and scrambles things, or locks the machine up, every few days.The Z88 will run BBC BASIC - a dialect much-lauded by those who know more about fashion than they do about computer science. BBC BASIC is faster and more expressive than ZX BASIC - but it's less friendly. A version of BBC BASIC for the Z80 processor has been available for several years, so it should not take long to get the core ofit running on the Z88. It will be interesting to see how much support we get for the paged memory and LCD graphics. Will we be stuck with the 64K memory limit of other versions on this machine which promises over 3 Megabytes of 'instantly-addressable memory'? The claims about the memory capacity of the Z88 should be taken with a pinch of salt. There are slots for three ROM or RAM cartridges at the front of the machine, and 32K and 128K cartridges are promised to be available with the first machines in April, with a 1 megabyte version coming 'soon'. That will be built around the 'wafer scale integration' ideas that have been kicking around Sinclair's 'Metalab' for several years - but there's no sign yet of the £6 million needed to get those ideas into production.The only standard interface is an RS-232 port, which allows access to modems, serial printers, and other computers - at least in theory. RS-232 interfacing is a black art at the best of times, and Sinclair serial interfaces have a reputation for idiosyncracy.
I enjoyed reading the Z88 brochure, and -as usual - I wanted to order one as soon as I'd finished. The design seems full of good ideas, but it's clearly not finished yet. CAMBRIDGE COMPUTER are talking about production levels of 10,000 machines a month,but this is a pretty meaningless figure, as it's the usual 'minimum order' quantity for mass-production of computers. I'll be pleased, but surprised, if Sinclair can sell Z88's in respectable numbers. EPSOM, NEC and TANDY have all attacked the A4 portable computer market and found slim pickings. The appeal of a portable computer has been clear since XEROX came up with the idea of the Dynabook, long before the personal computer industry existed. The Z88 is a step in that direction, and will doubtless appeal to some people, but the product hardly lives up to the slogan, 'full-facility, no-compromise computing' at the moment. It's especially sad that Spectrum compatibility has been ruled out, because that could have given the Z88 the mass-market appeal that it presently lacks. But Sinclair is still a man to watch, and - rest assured -CRASH will keep watching.
Amstrad have announced a Spectrum Plus Three. This will have one built-in disk drive in place of the Plus Two's cassette, and an operating system written by Locomotive Software,the firm's tame programming house. At the time of writing (early March) there's been no sight of a finished product although that hasn't prevented less reputable magazines than CRASH from getting their crayons out. The word is that boss Alan Sugar has given the development team until the end of March to sort out the design. We'll bring you all the facts, and intelligent analysis as soon as the new machine materialises.