I was wondering if anyone with a Class model has used Google Drive and Documents? If so, does it run well?
I guess I also want to know how well typing on it is for when you are not home, say in a word processor?
I'm sure at this point every single gaming question has been asked and is in the wiki, but I was just curious on how well this device works for writers out there?
I have been
pleasantly surprised by my CC unit for plain browsing (reading articles is comfortably fast or downright snappy, loading the browser initially just takes a while) and using the only work related webapp I need to use (which works fully and is speedy enough).
From comments in these forums I feared the CC would be pretty much unusable for even basic browsing
with firefox. Not the case at all.
So, when I read this post I figured I might as well try this for you and at the same time see myself how a really heavy webapp works
.
I tried with Firefox, logged in, created a new doc... Warning: Unresponsive script.
Tapped Continue and after some seconds I was able to type text with some lag.
Then tried to copypaste from wikipedia... Warning: Unresponsive script.
Tapped Continue and after some seconds text appears on screen and I was able to move in the text with arrowkeys, bold text etc.
Whether you consider this a bad experience or good depends on where you come from. If heavy text editing (there's different fonts, bullets, hypertext links, all kinds of stuff on screen now...) had been as fluid as this on my Amiga 500 I would have been a very happy man back in the 80s...
...but your expectations might be higher now.
The bigger problem is that
I needed to both set Firefox to full screen and zoom out before I was able to see the longer menus completely. And by the time I had done that the text was way too small for me to work with it comfortably. I guess that is both a matter of taste and workflow, if you are ready to use zoom only when needed.
So in summary, after 15-30 minutes of messing with this:
Yes it
works.
All warnings were just that, only warnings, not errors. Firefox was simply not "patient" enough.
Once you start editing, it seems pretty OK, actually, especially if you do not mind a bit of lag while typing. Definitely a BBSy feel to it, though.
Making minimal edits (a letter, a comma...) to text already on screen seems to me to be fluid enough, especially considering the fact that the crap I copied from wikipedia has a lot of stuff going on. Even hyperlink popups come on screen at a very comfortable speed. It's the loading that's noticeably slow, editing is just laggy.
Adding text, like about a rowfull of stuff in the middle of the text lags but by the time you end up looking at the keyboard of the Pandora the text has mostly appeared on screen, a second or so for the rest of the text to appear and the end of the paragraph to reflow. At least in the text I copied and added. This probably varies by content.
This is clearly a desktop application... if there's a lighter, mobile version you can activate somehow that might be more suitable for the Pandora.
Adding a second drive document tab stalls. The CC simply does not have enough memory at that point. You enter a desert of unresponsive script messages and I even got to see a web page produced "the server is not responding quickly enough, try again by clicking "this link". That message was a big yellow bar (layer) at the top of the webpage itself for a while.
It is clear we're running on swap or whatever then. (I have not enabled swap or anything like that myself... but no crashes either... I assume Firefox itself manages the memory here?).
So it is one document at a time. Refreshing a drive tab after editing a doc is slow anyways.
Then again, even with this slowness, no, it didn't malfunction critically, it still worked as expected...
Google drive: Well, it is your bog standard Firefox I'm running, so of course it works. You need to zoom out. Clicking on reload takes some seconds. One tab only or you stall. Downloaded my test document as .docx... it came home very fast. Binned the test doc, deleted it from bin. Drive features all seem to work as far as I can see? With only one tab it isn't even annoyingly slow.
I have to say I would not use this... thing... not on a Pandora or a desktop. But then again I'm just grumpy old me and happy with Vim for my own texts and my own SSH server online for my own docs... There's simply no room or need for something like GoogleDocs in my life, all it does is use clockcycles I've paid good money for for gimmicky crap. But that's severy offtopic and a matter of taste .
I read your other post too and was going to answer: The Pandora can definitely do word processing, but you might want to opt for text editing more on the Pandora instead.
If it is your plan to bounce material back and forth between a desktop and the Pandora, then I don't know how well it'll work.
That would imply you are going to use Libre Office and if that is the case, then that one is quite a memoryhog? Haven't tried it at all, though... I'll let someone else chime in on that one.
Then there's the practical side of things: Do you use a lot of Home, End, Pageup, Pagedown and cursor keys? Or are you constantly using the trackpad or a mouse?
You might want to relearn using the keyboard, because keeping the stylus in your palm while typing is a bit awkward (is for me at least...).
The physical aspect of typing is pretty much what you could expect on a mid 2000 smartphone like a Nokia communicator, E70 or E61. Meaning as good as it ever got to be in phone/PDA combination devices. Except the applications are designed for also using the mouse and thus you need to tap the screen quite often. Unlike in said phones the keyboard is not at all "crammed". Even the Nokia 9000 keyboard was crammed compared to the Pandora. You don't need to be a kid or female and you don't need to sharpen your fingernails to heavy metal band sharpness to use this keyboard accurately
.
I can tell you this much: I am still faster writing
graffiti on a Palm device, than I am typing on the Pandora. Proper text recognizion has never worked for me, it's too slow to be of use. But Palms graffiti is still a winner, when you get used to it. It also makes the switching between stulys and keyboard redundant. It just works really well and I never really noticed before this...
I admit the primary reason I'm still faster with graffiti is simply my lack of practice on the Pandora.
Though the Pandora is qwerty, it has it's own keyboard layout you need to get used to.
It also has it's own feel to it. I sometimes have to hit a key twice to register, I try to "press lightly" and there is not "feel" for when to stop the action... you should hit the bottom every time and that is exactly the opposite of what I've been trying to teach myself to do...
Pressing Tab is especially something I never seem to just "automatically" get right...
Compared to other devices it is slightly... well... I'm hesitant to say "worse" than for example an old Nokia communicator, but definitely "different". As you might expect it doesn't hold a candle to a Psion 5 or somesuch. But then again, you'd label the Psion 5 as "netbook form factor" these days ;-).
Naturally this last part also applies to the 1 GHz version.
And at the end of the day it boils to this:
What choice have you got?!
Try and find a good, PDA-sized typing machine on eBay and you soon realize your're simply not being catered for :-(.
All the other devices you might be able to find are bound to be worse than the Pandora in pretty much every way.
You might just as well get a Pandora, because it's the best there is!
