PM Vs. mPower: a biased, but comprehensive, review

I welcome any comments, positive or otherwise, on the following review.

On Thursday July 14, I saw the BrailleNote mPower. A sales representative from HumanWare, who shall be nameless, came to my workplace to promote this newest product in the BN line. Note that when I say "BN", I'm referring to the BrailleNote. I've tried to refer to the mPower by name when I talk about it, but "BN," might also mean mPower. I have several thoughts on this product and on what the representative said. This is one of the longer posts that I have done, so get comfortable with your favorite beverage, and let's get started.

First off, let me say this: its about time the BN caught up to the PAC Mate (PM). The new mPower has many things that the PM has had for quite awhile, such as a USB port, stereo sound when wearing headphones, streaming audio, a built-in microphone and the ability to make recordings, and more. The major hardware differences that the mPower has added are extra USB ports, an SD card slot, and built in Bluetooth. However, the Bluetooth isn't that big of a deal since a PM user can buy a Bluetooth card to go in one of the two compact flash slots.
Software differences are not as long, but there are some notable ones, such as: an X-scale processor, which improves the speed of activities within the mPower, 128MB of internal storage area (the PM has only 10.5MB), and several minor differences in menu structure.

As I said before though, the PM has had many of these things for quite some time. And, what it doesn't have, I'm certain Freedom Scientific either has or is looking into implementing. Though, before anyone writes me on this, I have no inside information on any PM development, as much as I wish I did. What I do know is that FS does buy at least one of every kind of note taker when the said device comes out, in order to evaluate what the competition has that the PM doesn't have.

I'm going to break this entry down into sections, with my comments and the representative's comments sprinkled throughout.

Open or closed. As many may or may not know, the PM has an open, Windows style interface and the BN family has a closed, custom design system. The open interface means that you can add, if you wish, third party applications and programs. Verses the closed system where you can't add anything, even if you wanted to; you're stuck with the system you use. The representative came back several times to the fact that it has to do with design, interface and marketing. He said that their products are marketed so that a second grader can sit down and start using the device immediately, with minimal instruction. The downside of this is that you cannot add third party applications, which is a huge selling point to the PAC Mate, in my opinion. Sure, the programs you add may or may not work, but the fact is, you can add them to see if they do work. And many times, JAWS can be scripted to work with the new program. At one point, I even asked him, "But what you're really saying to someone is, 'You have to conform to our interface'." At which he said, after a short pause, "You're right."

The representative said that the major groups that purchase BN's are in education related fields, such as teachers and students, of many different backgrounds. When I asked him about adding third party applications, I mentioned things like a freeware thesaurus or dictionary. He asked me how well this dictionary or thesaurus might work, and what the person would do if the program is not supported by HumanWare. He pointed out that he cannot sell a product that runs programs which are not supported. I responded with, "But if it doesn't work, just uninstall it and try something else." He said that he could not do that; that it goes against his design principles and marketing, of selling products that may or may not work with programs. This point came up again and again in our discussions.

Infra-Red (IR) control. Both the PM and BN have an IR port on them, however there are differences in how they use them. The PM allows you to beam to and from the IR port, files, contacts, appointments, or other things. Both the PM and BN allow you to use your cell phone as a modem and use the IR port as a wireless connection. However, on the BN side, this is the only thing that they have done with their IR port. I sited, as an example, the FS Commander remote control program that Freedom Scientific has developed for the PM, in which you can program in various remote controls into your PM. So you can sit on your couch and only use one device, instead of several, or so you can control your stereo, or any device that receives IR beams. The representative said that this kind of program would not sell as well in the educational market. For whatever reason, he kept coming back to this point in our discussion, even when we had moved on to other things. I'm not sure what he was trying to communicate by doing this. I suppose he was saying that they couldn't develop third party programs like FS Commander and effectively distribute them, given the education sector they mainly sell to. However, when I countered with the fact that they could open their system up to dictionaries or thesauruses, the question of how usable they would be on the BN was constantly brought up. Anyway, the point is, the PM can interface with an unlimited number of things with its IR port, whereas the BN can only interface with a cell phone. I asked him if other programs or devices would or could be made to work with the BN with its IR port, and truthfully, he never answered the question. He danced around it and eventually came back to why FS would develop a remote control program and the fact that HumanWare couldn't sell that kind of program to their market audience.

BN and Maestro. I'm sure many people by now know that PulseData HumanWare and VisuAide merged in early 2005. HumanWare Canada (formerly VisuAide), manufacture, market, and sell the Maestro Hand held Organizer, which is an off the shelf PDA that has been made accessible, but which gives access to off the shelf programs in a Pocket PC environment. The question has been asked many times, by myself and others in the blindness field, including people inside HumanWare I'm sure, of which product will stay and which will go. Or, if HumanWare will keep and continue to develop both. I asked the representative about this, prefacing that many companies have only one product line for a given type of product. They may have several different models or kinds of that product, but they only have one product. Like Freedom Scientific's screen reader is JAWS. Anyway, he made clear that he was only a sales representative and not in upper management. However, he basically said he didn't know. He gave the company line of, "We'll continue to develop and sell both products." However, he also said, keeping in mind that he was speaking personally here and not in any affiliation with HumanWare, that he would like to see them drop Maestro and only support the BN line. He said that if someone wants a speech only note taker, that they could buy one of the classic models of VoiceNotes, which have recently been lowered to about the price of a new Maestro. Again, this was him speaking personally only.

We did get into an interesting talk about the kind of note taker that Maestro is, verses the BN or PM. He said, again, in his words and paraphrasing, who would want to use a note taker with limited note taking ability, such as the Maestro. He said that you can only keep track of phone numbers, addresses, and other small things on there. That the Maestro's interface is such that prolonged text input is troublesome, since you can enter in braille, but you have to enter each dot one at a time and then hit a confirm button. And, that this wasn't meant for taking notes for a long period of time. I mentioned that this is how many mainstream PDA's are though, that they are not meant for prolonged note taking, like the Palm Pilot or other Pocket PC PDA's. I even went so far as to suggest that we as blind people might actually be spoiled, since we have had real note taking devices for many years, dating as far back as the Braille Lite and Braille N' Speak. He didn't really have any comment on this, except to return to his comment that he would rather spend $1300 on a new VoiceNote, than $1300 on a new Maestro, if only for its note taking ability.

Interface. This section may tie in more with the closed operating system, but bare with me. The PM interface allows someone to learn how to use the PM, Windows, and a stripped down version of JAWS. Whereas, the BN interface is very simple, designed specifically for a blind user, in that to create a document, you bring up the Word Processor menu. Its literally that simple. And, for those that may not be familiar with Windows, even though Windows is everywhere and one will have to be familiar with it to get anywhere in this world (in my humble opinion), I can see how a simplified interface might be helpful. However, and this goes back to the operating system, with a simple interface, you limit yourself in what you can do. I brought this up to the representative, with respect to adding other applications. He came back to the support of those applications, and that this is not what HumanWare was about: selling a product that didn't support applications. He went on to comment on the interface and say that certain keystrokes on the Braille oriented (Perkins) PM, were inconsistencies. That the Braille chords used didn't make sense, like L-chord to go to the top of a file. He said that instead of using this, someone could use T-chord, for top of file, etc. I then responded with, "Well, to be fair, on the BN QT (QWERTY or computer style keyboard model), the keystrokes are not consistent either. You press one keystroke to delete one way and another to delete another." He agreed, for what its worth. He said that the QWERTY keystrokes should be written better, but probably won't be since they don't sell a lot of QT units. I then asked him, "So, since you don't sell a lot of QT units, you're not going to rewrite the keystrokes?" His answer, "I didn't say that."

Upgrading. With regards to upgrading a BN that you already have, to a new mPower, the representative said that it would cost $1,995 to upgrade, which involves sending your old BN in, and them switching the display from the old unit to a new mPower, and then returning it to you. He said that the new VoiceNote mPower costs $1,995, so in a sense, people would be buying a VoiceNote mPower with a display. I said that, though I was sure that they would sell a lot of upgrades and mPower's themselves, what about the average user who may not have the $2,000 just laying around for the upgrade. He never really gave a definite answer on this, except to say that given the blind market, there will always be those who can't afford to buy certain kinds of technology. So, as with other things, I suppose that even if you really want it, if you don't have the money, you're stuck. This is a fact of life, but I would have liked to see the upgrade price be a little less, especially for the people who already have a BN. I can understand charging full price fora new unit, which full price is about $6,000, but $1,995 for an upgrade--boy! Looking back on the Freedom Scientific side of things, when they initially came out with their current BX and QX PM units, they offered an upgrade price of about $800 for people that had the first generation PM's, the BNS and TNS units. That seems more reasonable to me than twice that much.

The Battery. Though HumanWare has updated the kind of battery they use in the mPower, over the older BN model, the battery life is still the same: about 20 hours for a BrailleNote and 25 hours for a VoiceNote, on average. They have also, with the new battery, improved the recallibration process for the battery. So, if you have to recallibrate your BN battery, whereas it used to take a weekend, it now takes about 10 hours with the mPower. I'm not sure how long it takes with the PM, since I haven't had to recallibrate my battery yet.

The point about the battery that I found different from the PM is the amount of time you're given to plug it in to charge. The PM gives you 72 hours, from the time that the battery hits 0, to plug in and to charge the battery. Otherwise, you lose all your data in the main memory. The mPower has nothing like this. The representative said that you do have a few minutes, maybe 5 or so, but not hours like the PM. This is unfortunate in my view, since you might have a user that travels a lot and may not be near an outlet when the battery hits 0, which means that they're stuck. The representative said that there has been some talk in HumanWare to allow people to have external battery packs in just these situations. That's better than nothing, but I've heard differing opinions on these external batteries. Some people say that since the battery sticks out, there's a greater chance of bumping it against things and damaging the equipment. Then the unit may have to be sent in for repair. One person told me that she'd rather send in her PM to get an internal battery, than have an external one that might be damaged from contact with things in her environment. This person also told me that after moving the battery in and out many times, that corrosion can build up, and cause problems with the battery's operation, and even that it can bring down the charge the battery provides.

Braille Displays. There is one more major difference between the PM and the BN: the navigation on their Braille displays. Specifically, the fact that there are Whiz Wheels on the PM displays. Freedom Scientific have introduced these wheels, which appear on either side of the display, and allow you to set each wheel to move in one of 4 different increments: lines, sentences, paragraphs or focus panning. What's neat is that you can set each wheel independent of the other. For instance, you can have the left wheel move by lines, and the right wheel by focus panning. The other thing that's great about these Whiz Wheels is that if you set the left wheel to lines, you can change it at any time. For example, if you want to scroll through a file and look for a particular paragraph, you can set the left wheel to paragraphs until you find what you're looking for, and then set it back to lines. I'm sure that the BN's thumb controls are nice, but can you program each thumb control to move by a set increment, e.g., line, sentence, etc? And, can you change these settings on the fly?

In conclusion: the mPower has gained a lot of ground from the classic style of BN. However, it still comes down to a question of interfaces, as the representative admitted. For me, it comes to a question of: Do you want to be in a closed system where you're stuck, or an open system where you can freely try things, that admittedly may not be supported, and see how well they may work? And, if they don't' work, then just remove them and try something else. Plus, there's simply more possibilities with the PM in this regard. For instance, if you know how to script, you can make an application accessible with JFW, or you could even write your own program, which several people have done in the PM community. This cannot be done with the BN, since they have not, and in my opinion will not, released their Software Developer's Kit (SDK).

In my view, there are three things which distinguish the PM from the BN, and are the main reasons why I will not switch anytime soon: the closed operating system, the fact that you cannot add external programs, even if you just want to try them, and the Whiz Wheels. Until HumanWare incorporates something like this into their displays, I don't see them, or anyone else for that matter, catching up to FS anytime soon.