Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.Talking clocks on Psion palmtops are nothing new, of course, but
Mark O'Neill's freeware 5Talk is a
well-thought out implementation, providing day of week as well as time and
taking up only 200k of disk space. As with most other versions, this activates
when the Series 5 is powered up, especially via the external 'Play' button. The
speech samples are clear and playable at three different volumes.
Special provision is made for a 'Night-time' mode, in which volume is
automatically set to 'low' and the backlight turned on for the duration of the
time announcement, whereupon the time and date are flashed on screen as well,
in case you'd opened the machine and wanted visual confirmation.
There are two downsides to having a program of this type installed, both of
which Mark highlights in his documentation. Firstly, the sound of any alarms
that go off will clash with the digital sound coming from 5Talk - Mark advises
that you use 5Talk's Preferences dialogs to tell the utility about your usual
programmed alarms so that it holds off for their duration. The second problem
is that if you've got Series 5 password protection turned on and a lengthy
enough password that it takes more than about 5 seconds to enter it correctly,
you'll find 5Talk switching the machine off before you've had time to gain
access. Again this is catered for in the Preferences dialog, with an option to
extend the delay before switch-off.
During the course of the review, I experienced several very small glitches,
where either the system screen appeared frozen or the Series 5 kept turning
itself back on after I'd manually turned it off, each presumably side effects
of the utility. These are minor faults though and I'm being quite picky. 5Talk
is very well constructed and packaged and for many people has the potential to
be part of their daily routine. Download your own copy from Mark's
web site.
| 