Friday, November 1, 2002

Presenter-to-Go puts PowerPoint presentations on your Palm OS handheld

PRODUCT REVIEW

By Vladimir Campos

I remember when I bought my first Palm handheld. The must-have accessories at that time were modems, extra cradles or HotSync cables, and cases. Even if I wanted something else, I wasn't able to buy any other sophisticated accessories. These were all they had available at that time. Suddenly the handheld market started growing and accessories like keyboards, digital cameras, and other add-ons became very common. Then, I remember a lot of people starting to question the real use for handhelds: "Should we consider them regular organizers or mini-notebooks?"

In my opinion, they are becoming more and more like mini-notebooks because of eyboards, modems, digital cameras, GPS, wireless connection, network connection, etc. What else would we need to agree that we have a real notebook in our pocket?


"Now I can tell you that my handheld has really replaced notebook."

An accessory to make PowerPoint presentations would be great, wouldn't it? This is exactly what you get with Presenter-to-Go from Margi Systems(at http://www.margi.com/products/prod_ptg.htm). If you have a handheld equipped with a keyboard, Internet connection, and Presenter-to-Go, you're all set to leave your notebook behind during small business trips or to attend business meetings.

Some history

The first version of Presenter-to-Go was created for the Visor community, and it was based on Springboard technology. A Visor user could create a presentation using PowerPoint on his or her desktop and, after synchronizing it to a handheld, connect the Visor to a projector using a cable and start the presentation, as you can see in Figure A.

FIGURE A

A Visor handheld is connected to a projector by Presenter-to-Go cables and a Springboard. (click for larger image)

There's even a very nice Case Study at the Margi Web site about a user who purchased his Visor handheld with Presenter-to-Go in mind. You can read it at http://www.margi.com/products/solutions/cs_tufts.html. The nice thing about the Visor version of Presenter-to-Go is that the Springboard also works as 2MB of extra memory to store presentations.

Nowadays, Presenter-to-Go is also available for Palm handheld users via an SD connector and for Pocket PC users via a Compact Flash connector. A new version for Sony Clie handhelds is about to be released, and it will be based on Memory Stick technology. Visit http://www.margi.com/pressroom/pr_sony_ms_ptg.htm for more details.

Presenter-to-Go has been adapted to each of the most popular handhelds available in the market, but the software is almost the same for all of them. So, let's understand how it works.