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PocketMail
Composer
Owner Review by Rick Allnutt
"It is easy to type with the Composer in my lap
at the end of a long day of
hiking"
Risk
 PERSONAL BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Rick Allnutt
51 Year old male
6' 0'' (183 cm) in height
190 lbs (86 kg) in weight
Email address: rick (at) BackpackGearTest (dot) org
I live in Dayton, Ohio
BACKPACKING BACKGROUND
Over the last several years, I have become an ultralight camper with a
three-season base pack weight of about 11 lb (5 kg) and skin out weight of 20 lb
(9 kg). I have completed many section hikes on the Appalachian Trail (AT) in all
four seasons, with a total mileage of nearly 450 miles (725 km). I am a gearhead,
a hammock camper, and make much of my own equipment.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Manufacturer: PocketMail
Year Manufactured: 2004
Manufacturer's Link: http://www.pocketmail.com/
MSRP:
$99 US (Composer device)
$9.95 to $16.95 US per month of service
Listed Weight: 8.2 oz (232 g)
Measured Weight: 8.3 oz (235 g) including 2 AA batteries
Size: 6.4" x 3.2" x 0.9" (16.3cm x 8.1cm x 2.3cm)
Memory: 1 megabyte on device, 12 megabytes on service
Review Date: 1 July 2004
TEST CONDITIONS
I have used the PocketMail Composer on a two week section hike on the AT. In
addition I have used it nearly every day for writing about an hour at lunch time
for 3 months. It continues to function well and has given me no problems at all.
It has required changing the batteries twice. A fresh set of batteries lasts
nearly a month with daily use, when the backlight is not used. Temperatures have
ranged from below freezing to about 90 F (32 C).
REVIEW
I love to tell stories, setting the introduction, supplying the details
and bringing the story to a memorable conclusion. I also love to write a daily
journal and then mine that journal for story ideas and insights.
I enjoy the relaxed nature of mail, keeping up with pen pals, family, and
friends all over. Going on a long hike has always meant giving up much of that
communication, going cold turkey. This has especially been true since I have
gotten used to worldwide communication through email.
I also like to write when I am hiking. I have put many words on paper while in
the out-of-doors, but it always seems like a boring chore to transpose that
writing to a computer so it can be shared. I was therefore very interested when
I discovered a group of Appalachian Trail journals written while the journalist
was on the trail. Often, that hiker referred to using a device called PocketMail.
Being an electronic device junkie, I knew I had to have one and see if all the
good news about it was true.
Cometh PocketMail!
PocketMail is a portable e-mail system. The personal hardware of the system is
the small and light PocketMail Composer device. With a small black and
gray/green text display and a miniature keyboard, I am able to sit in a shelter
or sit on a rock and touch type with the Composer on my knees. In the photo at
the top of the page, I am working on this review.
The system also includes a proprietary email service provider. A service package
must be purchased to use this part of the system. The service costs about the
same amount per year as the purchase price of the Composer hardware. With the
service comes a single email address.
The connection between the device and the email server is through an acoustic
telephone modem. A what you say?
History Lesson: In the early days of personal computers, acoustic modems were
common. An acoustic modem was usually a box next to the computer with a "cradle"
into which a phone hand set was stuffed, and which made communication through
the microphone and speaker of the handset.
The PocketMail device has a little fold-out acoustic modem which works much like
those acoustic modems of old. This is both good and bad.
The downside of the acoustic modem connection is that communication speed is
slow. It is somewhat improved with a modern digital signal processing (DSP)
algorithm, but it is still not fast. It takes a minute to transmit each of my
roughly page long compositions. (Printed page of about 500 words or 3500
characters.) Receive speed is the same.
The other restriction brought by the slow speed is that email is restricted to
text only. No pictures, no attachments, no graphics, no fonts.
However, the good side of this use of an acoustic modem is that almost any phone
can be used as a link to send and receive email. For the United States and other
countries with a toll free 1-800 system, the call is to a 1-800 number. For most
European countries, an in country number is set up for the system. For the
globetrotting hiker, there is no additional charge for using any of these in
country systems, and they are all interconnected. The service allows an
unlimited number of emails, both sent and received at no additional cost.
But the really good news is that any pay phone,
hotel phone, grocery store phone, or residential phone near the AT can be used
to send and receive email. Some cell telephones work with the PocketMail system.
My cell phone does not work well with it, and I do not try to make connections
through the cell phone.
It works like this:
-call 1-800 number
-put phone handset up to the back of the PocketMail device
-press button on front of PocketMail box
-Wait a half minute to several minutes until a three tone signal is made by the
PocketMail device.
I find the system is really useful on the trail and off. I am writing this
report right now on the device, enjoying the summer sun in a park during a lunch
break. I am also able to use the device in the library, at my kid's soccer games,
and at meetings. I have small to medium sized hands (US size 7 1/2) and I have
no difficulty touch typing just like with a computer keyboard. The keys are
closer together, but an hour of typing is enough to get used to the small size
of the keyboard. I also can type with both thumbs when I am standing or lying
down and have nothing to rest the keyboard on.
The system shines best in the setting of long distance hiking, especially on the
AT, with its road crossings and re-supply points every few days.
While out on a recent two week section hike on the AT, I spent
time every evening writing daily journals, gear reports, and essays to describe
and record my experience. I was able to upload my writing and receive email from
my family every 2-4 days during the hike. This contact kept me feeling better
about my family contact and was a great release for recording the thinking I was
engaged in on the long daily walks.
DETAILS
Screen: The black on gray/green screen has 40
characters by 8 lines. There is no provision for user graphics, though the
system uses a small number of graphic icons on the Main Menu. The screen is easy
to read in all daytime lighting conditions without any distraction from glare or
wash-out. The backlight is quite functional, but I have used it very little.
Trail reports of very fast battery consumption using the backlight urged me to
use an LED headlamp instead of the internal backlight. PocketMail is easy to
read with the headlamp. I have not needed to make any adjustment in brightness
or contrast since opening the box. This is the beauty of a pure black on "white"
character set.
Batteries: In more than 3 months of daily use, I have replaced the two AA
batteries once. There was no loss of information when I did so. The battery
compartment also serves as the hinge to open the device, and it has proved to be
quite robust. The battery compartment has a locking switch which keeps the case
closed. In all my travels, I have never had the compartment open accidentally.
Water and Electrons: There is no implied warranty about any water protection. I
have used the device several times in dense fog (with condensing moisture on the
keyboard) without failure. I have given this device the same sorts of protection
from rain that I normally give to other electronics. I have a very water
resistant sanctuary in my pack for electronic devices: Inside the pack cover,
inside a pack made of waterproof material, inside the waterproof foam sleeping
pad, inside my rolled-up
Pocket Bucket. With this multiple layer protection system, the device
has never been doused with water, even in hours long rain. I do not use
the device in rain and have not spilled any water on the keyboard.
Message integrity: The DSP works very well! In these several months of
use, I have never received a message with garbled characters and have not seen
any garbled characters sent from the device. On occasion, I have seen that
several punctuation marks are incorrectly coded to the appropriate character by
some email systems by other users. My emails have not suffered this
problem, but I have seen email from at least one other PocketMail user with this
problem. This seems to especially be true with the " and ' characters.
Physical Box: The integrity of the device is quite sturdy. I built a small pouch
for it after a few cosmetic scratches appeared after I had carried the
PocketMail Composer in the outside pocket of my pack and it had rubbed against a
camera and tent stakes. Similar pouches are available from suppliers, including
the PocketMail people. Mechanically, operation of the Composer is
intuitive. <On> turns it on, almost instantaneously (no boot up delay).
There are no motors, beeps, clicks, or other noises. It is completely
silent.
Keyboard: The keyboard is composed of surface mounted click buttons instead of
keys. This takes some getting used to. In general, the Composer works just
like any other keyboard device with one exception. Each time a button such as
the shift or <cntl> keys are pressed they change state. I do have trouble when I
press the shift key to begin a sentence, and then automatically press <shift>
<I> to begin that sentence. The system takes the first shift as a command
to make the next letter a capital, and then gets a reversal to that command just
before I press the <I> key. "i" ends up being typed. Several
commonly used punctuation marks can only be typed with the <cntl> key.
They include: /, \, ", and '. The comma, period and dash can all be typed
with a single key. All numbers are available with a single key click as are all
letters. Capital letters require <shift> but a string of capital letters
can be typed with <shift> continuously pressed. The punctuation marks above the
numbers are standard and can be accessed with either <shift> or <cntl>.
Memory: The device is reported to have 1 megabyte of on-board memory. With
10-15 received, sent, and ready to send emails on the device, I have never
exceeded 3 percent of the memory. Text messages just do not occupy much space
for me while backpacking. I do not have large numbers of emails delivered to me
while on the trail and this constraint of the system is well beyond anything I
will ever need. The practical constraint is the time it would take to download a
hundred messages from a list server. Since I do not anticipate spending 20
minutes with the Composer up to the phone, I will never get to the point that my
memory ever gets near to being full. The server side email holds 12
megabytes of mail - text only. For me, that equates to more than a year's
worth of personal email, with none of it deleted.
Connection: Other than the obvious connection with the service through the
Composer, the email on the service provider's server can also be accessed from
any Internet connection. The email can be accessed through a user
password. The provided Internet features include "message filtering,
customizeable auto-signature, maximum message length of up to 60K, attachment
handling, folders, and group address handling." Automatic address consolidation
can retrieve email from other services and relay them to the PocketMail device.
Attachments that are not text based are saved on the server and can be accessed
from an Internet connection. The normal maximum length of an email message is
limited to 6K characters (approximately two typed pages of text on paper) but
longer messages can be divided up automatically by the server into a series of
messages for a total capacity of 60K (or 12 pages of text). I have not
discovered a way to access my PocketMail account via a POP3 account, though the
product's internet site implies this can be done.
I respect the chronic risk of an email address being "spammed" - receiving
multiple unwanted messages a day. To protect my @pocketmail.com address, I
use a forwarding email address outside the PocketMail system. I have
set my device to show this email address as the "from" line. To the
outside reader of my email, they respond to that address, not the actual
PocketMail address. If the forwarding email ever gets "spammed" I will
simply choose another forwarding email address and abandon the first.
While the Composer has the ability to link directly with a computer, that
feature has little backpacking use for me. I have never needed or wanted to do
so in the first three months of using PocketMail. A review of that feature will
need to wait for someone who finds a use for it.
What I really like about PocketMail
- lightweight
- long battery life
- easy to transfer electronic writing to the Internet or email pen pals
What I don't like:
- expensive service for a single email account
Read more reviews of PocketMail gear
Read more gear reviews by Rick Allnutt
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