It was with great excitement, therefore, that I awaited my evaluation unit of the Brother GeoBook. I knew it was gonna be a relatively cheap, light, self-contained little creature that didn't care a fig for desktop publishing or mega-browsers. When it arrived, this glorified typewriter showed all the signs of fulfilling my dreams of neo-simplicity; in fact, it looked like some kind of Fisher-Price computer, of average notebook size. (I found it rather cute.) The Geos software suite looked quite sufficient, in its Spartan way, offering up spreadsheet, Internet, day planner, fax, and word processing software, among others.

[Click here for Tech Specs]

Actually *using* the funny grey box, however, is like being dropped in the middle of Amish country wearing electric-green PVC hotpants and stainless steel pasties. You become aware that you're in a foreign land and ought to adjust your expectations accordingly... you will not be scanning photos of your cat in one window while browsing the FBI's website in another, and you won't be downloading a new Archie client or networked game for your GeoBook anytime soon. The interface will seem goofy at times -- can't you select multiple messages in this darned email program, look at a large webpage even with images turned off, or save a file more than 100K in size? Doesn't look like it.

Such details probably wouldn't matter to your neo-Luddite friend who's finally admitted she needs to have email access, or the relatively poor student who knows he'll want to haul a computer in a backpack to Guatemala after writing his term papers on it. These are the lightweight baby notebook's most likely users, and they'll find it a friendly, adequate machine, especially once they understand that this isn't a "real" computer and won't do what your Pentium II or G3 does. I tested this by loaning the GeoBook to a designer, someone with a great deal of Mach experience but who's never gotten on the Internet before. Within an hour or two, he was emailing like mad and surfing around with the happy lil' Globehopper GeoBrowser.

Despite the shiny simplicity of its surface, the GeoBook does barf out. Of course. That's just what computers do. That's why the GeoBook has a nice, kiddie-toy style power switch on the side. Rebooting isn't just fun, it's easy with Geos--it gets back up and running in seconds! During our test-drive, the box frequently froze up while we used the Web browser, eventually returning error messages telling us to reinstall the system software. Uh-oh. Your neo-luddite sculptor friend, the distant great-aunt who got an Earthlink account from the family for Christmas: they really don't want to see a terrifying message like that. In fact, this is why the GeoBook was recommended to them in the first place, to shield their eyes from such horrors. But such are the inevitable drawbacks of any appliance that's got a chip inside.

With a list price of $799, the GeoBook isn't just a toy. It offers many of the usual computing conveniences: touchpad, internal modem, PC card slot. It's got a VGA port so you can use it with a larger monitor, 25-pin printer port, 9-pin serial port for mice and external modems. Though the price of this color screen GeoBook NB-80c is expected to drop, the NB-60 model with its 9.4" grayscale display, might be a better value at only $599 list (you also get more life out of those batteries when using the NB-60).

Is the GeoBook worth it? Not for a power user who knows how to buy a used laptop and soup it up properly, and certainly not for anyone who needs serious horsepower while they're on the road. But if you're tired of complications, fat operating systems, and time-consuming reboots, the GeoBook could make a handy mobile companion for basic writing and communications. Especially if the price drops $100-200, the GeoBook NB-80c will be a promising first notebook for users with basic needs and a tight budget.

- Tiffany Lee Brown [4/14/98]