8. Reading the Manuals

Previous section...

This should be another short section too because I have yet to read the manuals from front to back :-).

Seriously, though, I must commend onHand for providing the couple of high quality onHand User's Manual and onHand PC Software User Manual.  It is high quality in terms of the topics covered, details and illustrations provided, and, hey, great English! :-)

The User Manual

The first section provides an overview of the watch operations, from the changing of batteries and resetting of the watch, to the exact function and examples of using each of the hardware buttons.  Subsequent sections describe the operation and use of each of the built in programs, from the Soft Keyboard, to PIM functions, and to the games and accessories.  There are also sections explaining the comms interfaces of using the docking station and IR.  Troubleshooting pretty much outlined the most common problems and there is a detailed description of the process of formatting the flash disk and re-establishing the factory configuration.  There is even a section detailing the process of replacing the start-up screen!

The PC Software Manual

This provides a description of all the onHand developed software that comes on the CDROM.  It does NOT cover the CompanionLink Software.  It describes the short installation processes and goes at length with the description of each and every one of the programs.  Exactly how detailed is the documentation?  Well, I have not seen many software manuals that describe how to obtain the version number of the software, or how to resize a window!  I liked, in particular, the section on the Sound Editor, because that is the only section I really needed to read since all the supplied software programs are very user-friendly and intuitive to use.

The CompanionLink Manual

This is a sorry excuse of a software manual, probably produced as an after-thought by CompanionLink Software.  There is no troubleshooting section, so I supposed the company was pretty confident that their software will work on ANY platform and machine configuration.  That is obviously a pretty tall order because all the problems that I have with the onHand PC software can actually be traced back to the installation of this software.  Unfortunately, this is pretty much the ONLY way by which I could get the watch to sync with my Outlook 2000 PIM data.  More on this later.

Next Section...

For comments, please contact Eng-Whatt Toh.
Back to EW's Gadget Zone

This page hosted by

   Get your own Free Home Page