Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Presenting On The Go: The Impatica Showmate Reviewed
Posted by Jon Westfall in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM
Good Things Come In Small Packages
Impatica promised in their promotional materials to deliver a product that would free you from the laptop and be "revolutionary". Quite a tall order to fill in such a small device. I received my Showmate in a small box that contained the following:
The Quickstart Card implored me to download all of the software fresh from Impatica's site, a precaution I'm glad to see someone has started giving. With new technology, bugs are inevitable. Many times the drivers provided on a disc are the absolute oldest around, with many bugs cleared up if the users install software off of the website. So I skipped the disc and downloaded the 30 MB or so of software I needed, including the viewer file that runs on the Pocket PC, the Impatica For Powerpoint software that converts your Powerpoint files to the proprietary Impatica format used by the viewer, and a firmware update for the device. All installed fine except the firmware, which told me that the firmware on my device was actually newer than the firmware I downloaded! I decided to stick with the pre-loaded firmware unless I ran into troubles. After installing everything, I was ready to begin.
Convert Me!
I decided to choose a rather large Powerpoint presentation as my first test of the device - the Powerpoint I used when I defended my Master's thesis earlier this year. This file had graphics, step-by-step reveals, and around 40 slides. While I had a copy of the presentation in Powerpoint 2007's native format (.pptx), I was forced to use an earlier version in Powerpoint 97 - 2003 format (.ppt) - the software would not recognize the latest format. This isn't really suprising, and not a major issue unless you have your heart set on using some of the transitions inherent to the newest version of Powerpoint.
Figure 1: The Impatica Converter summary, the conversion process took around 20 seconds.
As it turns out, having your heart set on cute transitions is not a good thing with the Showmate. In order to be efficient and to allow you to compress your file into a small enough size, the software strips out some of the fancier Powerpoint effects. For purely getting the message across, I've never found most of these effects to be useful, so they were not missed. It did decide to keep the step-by-step reveal animations, which was nice to see. I copied the output file to my device and fired up the viewer!
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