Ericsson MC 12
Quick facts |
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Ericsson MC12 Mobile Companion
Sales pitch from when it was new
(tbd)
Information
Ericsson MC12 was Ericsson’s first foray into the PDA market. The MC12 was basically a re-badged version of HP 320LX but had some unique software that allowed easy communication between the MC12 and Ericsson’s phones of that time - in particular the SH888. The communications software “My Ericsson Phone” and a virtual softmodem shipped on a separate flash memory card, allowed the user to send and receive SMS:es and use the phone as a modem to connect to the Internet.
The MC12 used Microsoft’s first operating system for PDA’s - the Windows CE 1.0. You would use the pen to select and click on things on the screen, but use the keyboard for any entering of data, since Windows CE 1.0 lacked hadwriting recognition software.
Ericsson later released an upgrade to Windows CE 2.0 for this unit. The upgrade required you to actually replace the physical ROM circuits with new ones. (See links below for instructions).
Windows CE 1.0 offered the usual PIM applications - Contacts, Calendar, Tasks (Todo) and also “pocket version” of Microsoft Word and Excel. As it turned out, these “pocket versions” were very limited compared to their PC counterparts and if you used the synchronisation feature to download a Word document onto the PDA, edit it and then synchronise it back, you would loose all the formatting in the original document (only the limited formatting of Pocket Word was retained), in reality making it useless for anything but very short and simple documents.
The e-mail software (called “Inbox”) was quite useful, even though it did only support the POP protocol. Even if you could opt only to download the first say 2k of an e-mail message, what happend in reality was that the entire message was downloaded, and only then cropped to the specified maximum size. Needless to say, this made e-mailing over the 9.6 Kb/s GSM line very slow at times.
Ericsson MC12 was later followed by the Ericsson MC16, another re-badged unit from HP and Ericsson MC218, a re-badged Psion 5MX before Ericsson gave up on the “pure” PDA market. Before creating the jointly owned company with Sony - SonyEricsson - Ericsson released a combined phone and PDU unit called the Ericsson R380. Nowadays basic PDA funtionality is built-in into every higher-end phone from SonyEricsson.
Personal notes
The MC12 was probably the second PDA I used, after the Psion 3a. Being spoiled with the speed and stability of the Psion, I remember that I thought that Windows CE was horrible in comparison. It was slow and very buggy. While I had to reboot the Psion only once in a one year period, I usually had to reboot the MC12 at least once a day. Also application launch, input etc was much slower on the MC12 than on the Psion. Because the CPU on the MC12 was actually much faster than the one on the Psion, I could only draw the conclusion that the fault was the operating system from Microsoft. The screen, although perfectly legible, was not as high contrast as the Psion, probably because it was a touch-sensitive screen as opposed to the non touch-sensitive screen on the Psion.
The MC12 was quite bulky compared to the Psion as well. When used in its supplied leather case, it resembled one of the larger Filofaxes on the market (quite intentionally, I suppose).
Links
Installing the hp 320LX & Ericsson MC12 Windows CE 2.0 ROM Upgrade