12, Jan, 2025
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Ericsson MC 218

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You’re obsessive about keeping in contact. You get the shakes if you can’t check your email or surf the Web for a few hours. You have an Ericsson mobile phone. You (or your employer) have far too much money. If this sounds like you, rush out today and buy an MC 218.
The MC 218 further blurs the distinction between a PDA and a subnotebook. It’s about the size and configuration of a large PDA — small crowded keyboard and 640 by 240 backlit LCD screen. Its clamshell design means the keyboard slides out when you flip open the screen. Unless you have very small fingers, typing is going to be a two-finger hunt-and-peck job, bearing in mind that a lot of the symbol and punctuation characters are not where you would expect them to be. For a device that’s so Internet-focused, it’s odd that the I key is Shift-7 while the @ key is F2 — you would think it would have been a good idea to make these keys a little easier to access.
Ericsson’s MC 218 runs on a 37MHz ARM 710T processor and uses Symbian’s EPOC32 operating system. This is the same OS used by Psion Series 5 organisers. The organiser comes with 16M of memory. The OS is quite attractive, and makes good use of the limited screen space available. It allows multitasking, but switching between applications is clumsy.
In addition to all the standard organiser applications like contact list, calendar and to-do list, the MC 218 has a preinstalled word processor, spreadsheet and card index-style database application. It has sound playback and recording capabilities, and the sound recorder lets you compress your files to save storage space. However, the uncompressed sound takes up a lot of memory, so you can only record 30 seconds at a time.
Connection to your PC is through a cable that plugs into the serial port or through infra-red. Ericsson provides software that allows you to back up the MC 218 and synchronise your organiser with your PIM software. It also has some clever options. For example, it allows you to mark your out-of-hours appointments as ‘private’, or, if you prefer, don’t transfer them to the PC at all. The software had no trouble synchronising with Microsoft Outlook, but it had all sorts of problems with Lotus Notes. It didn’t appear to have options other than Outlook and Notes/ Organiser, but chances are that third-party solutions are available.
Did we mention the Internet? The MC 218 comes with an infra-red modem that plugs into the bottom of all new Ericsson mobile phones as well as the older 600, 700 and 800 series phones. This allows you to connect to email, fax, Short Message Services and the Internet. The phone needs to be within about half a metre of the organiser with a direct line of sight, and if you lose the connection for more than a few seconds, the modem
will disconnect.
The first advantage of this connection is that you can organise and edit your mobile’s phone book easily on the organiser, and you can easily swap phone numbers between the two.
The Internet functions work with any existing dialup Internet connection. You enter the details of the account into the MC 218 in much the same way as you set up an Internet connection on your PC. The Internet connection has some advanced features like scripting and server-assigned IP and DNS addresses.
Once this is set up, you can access email and Internet content easily, but because of its small screen and the 9.6Kbps download limit of GSM mobile phones, accessing some Web content isn’t all that much fun. The built-in Web browser can display pages with frames, but clicking through a link loses the frames. You can also download a Java virtual machine to run Java applets.
The browser can also handle Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which uses a cut-down version of HTML called Wireless Markup Language (WML) to reduce the amount of data needed to transfer over the slow wireless connection. At the moment there is no WAP content on the Internet, but Ericsson assures us it’s just around the corner. Ericsson also claims that by the end of the year Web-to-WAP gateways, which will convert standard Web content to WML, will be available.
There’s also quite a large library of software available for download from the Psion Web site, http://www.software. psion.com/ or from PDA Central (see http://www.pdacentral.com/ for a list of mirror sites). PDA Central’s 5 Alive News section has news on the latest Series 5 software.
Unless you have an Ericsson mobile phone — or are planning to buy one — you lose the main purpose of the MC 218, which is connectivity. It’s an expensive solution, but if you factor in the off-the-shelf cost of a mobile phone it’s probably about the same as the all-in-one Nokia Communicator 9110.

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