You probably can't spend more than a few minutes with the SE-300 before the thought "you get what you pay for" pops into your head. Although this thought occurs frequently with the NB-80c too, the final result is something that still delivers the goods, just less of them and not as high quality. The same, I'm afraid, can't be said of Sharp's Mobile Organizer.

It's when you pop open the cover of the SE-300 that things go horribly wrong. I sometimes take perverse pleasure in rubbing up against clueless design (at least when I'm not paying for the experience). I found lots to sneer and giggle at inside the SE-300:

• Screen real estate is gobbled up by a row of icons on the left side, a row of icons on the bottom and a margin for alert icons on the right. This leaves only a tiny rectangle of usable screen space. I don't know why they didn't use hardware buttons and screen menus to remove at least one of these rows of buttons. Do they not know what every other handheld designer knows (that screen real estate is precious, and if you use it, you'd better have a damn good reason)?
• No back-up battery. When the AA dies, so does your (un-backed-up) data.
• No handwriting recognition. No Graffiti, no Jot, no nothin'. Your only input options are a tiny keyboard and scrawling your notes on the screen.
• Years ago, interface designer extraordinaire Jim Leftwich and I started brainstorming an idea for an article on unintelligible program icons. We wanted to design our own set of icons that illustrated our point. Jim came up with some hysterical ones, like an image of Yoko Ono for "Undo," a box of Tide for "Clear," and a sausage for "Links." If we'd ever published the article, we could've gotten lots of real-world examples from the SE-300. There's an "L" with a human head, a box that says "Sta B," one that looks like it says "Con B," one that looks like a side view of a phone handset with "10" and "**," and one that says "It1" and has a symbol that looks like the entrance to a highway tunnel (a tunnel address on Highway 1 in Italy?). Of course, you can look in the manual and find out what these really represent, but this level of design clumsiness can be found throughout. Lots of the type is also so small you have to strain to read it.
• No compatibility with the PPC standard, PalmPilot, or anything else. It is compatible with Sharp Wizards, so you can port your Wizard contacts, etc. to the SE-300.
• Most of the applications (Activities, Contacts, Memo, Expense, Notes) have ugly, counter-intuitive interfaces that turned me off so much I couldn't even bring myself to learn how they really work. It felt sorta like someone saying: "Come on, Gar. Let's have some fun reading the tax code booklet and filling out some returns!" The manual is adequate, and the screens sure look better there than on the Organizer, but once you start working with the interface...ick.

[BTW: Wondering what those icons really stood for?
"L" with a human head = "Last Name"
Box with "Sta B" = "State (Business)"
"Con B" = "Country (Business)"
Phone handset with "10" and "**" = "Fax"
"It1" = "Internet 1" (For URLs)
Sheesh...where's that Tide icon when you need it?]

- Gareth Branwyn [7/29/98]