Geof Wheelwright, Ralph Bancroft and Richard King enter the realm of the takeaways

The world of convenience computers has arrived with a vengeance.

A happy convergence of affordable CMOS memory and similarly available flat-screen technology has recently resulted in a 'first flush' of impressive-looking lap-held or reasonably portable desktop systems. When it comes to running standard operating systems (and these days that means MSDOS) the larger, disk-based, full-screen luggables still rule the roost, but if you're into real portability and you don't particularly want to run Lotus 1-2-3 then one of these convenience compuetrs could be for you.

The Grid Compass features bubble memory, an 80-column by 24 display, an electro-luminescent screen and a £5,000 price tag. It has the unique distinction of being used on the US space shuttle, where it was code-named SPOC (the Shuttle Portable Onboard Computer).

Second is the Husky Hunter, a very portable portable that is half the size of the NEC PC-8201A and Tandy's Model 100. It has 80K, a CP/M operating system emulation and features a 40-column by 8-line LCD display. Memory can be expanded to 208K and the machine is supposed to be waterproof and unbreakable. The price for the basic machine is £997.

The final micro in this selection is Canon's X-07, the cheapest in the current crop of portables, but also the least powerful. It does, however, have its innovations including a unique 'credit card' RAM storage system. The X-07 is not yet scheduled for release in this country, but is expected to sell for about £250 when it arrives.

The Rolls Royce of portables, the Grid Compass, is not as fast or as powerful as the technology now allows but is still expensive, thirsty on fuel and with lots of style.

Thame Systems, the distributor, supplied the micro and a single disk drive in a zip-up carrying case, that is (like almost everything else) available as an optional extra.

The micro is housed in a slim, trim painted magnesium alloy case, small enough to fit into your average executive style briefcase with room to spare.

The construction is certainly robust. Thame Systems was anxious we should look after the machine carefully, a request we were more than happy to abide by. Unfortunately the micro and accompanying drive did in fact fall off the desk on to the floor, but on subsequent power-up it sprang to life without so much as a whimper.

Pushing two catches at the side, the front portion of the top cover tilts up to reveal a restful amber coloured flat screen.

If the colour of the flat screen is unique among lap-held portables then so is the resolution. A full 80-column and 24-line display is available compared to the usual 40 columns by 8 lines. This remarkable resolution is achieved with a new kind of screen called an electroluminescent display. The result is a screen that was previously only available by way of the traditional bulky cathode ray tube.

The keyboard has the usual keys plus two marked 'Code'. Unfortunately, they were located either side of the space bar which proved inconvenient. A similar criticism applies to the down cursor key that tended to be hit instead of the return key on its immediate left.

Unlike the previous portables, the Grid does not have an integral battery power pack so it is only as portable as the nearest mains socket.

However, for an extra £350, you can get a portable battery pack/charger unit.

The initial enthusiasm for the look and feel of the machine soon gave way to frustration as we tried to get to grips with the Grid operating system. In an attempt at clarity and ease of use the system requires the user to complete an on-screen form to call up an application and its associated data file.

As a result, something as simple as deleting a file means completing four separate fields on two separate forms: a process made easier (but more time-consuming) by calling up a menu of possible options for each field. Using the cursor control keys you skip to the option you want and press Return. On completion, the Grid asks for confirmation.

Many operating system commands are effected using the code and another key. This has the virtue of simplicity but can be confusing to a first time user. Another frustration is the time taken to load a file or application from the bubble memory (or, indeed, the disk drive) and that with a fast processor and maths co-processor. A weak link in the chain somewhere, perhaps.

The Compass has a minimum of connections to the outside world. A GPIB (or IEEE as it is usually known) connector is used for hooking up the disk drive units. The RS232C/R422 will help with printers, modems and other serial devices, though the use of a non-standard connector may create unnecessary difficulties for those who already have this kind of equipment. The lack of any kind of monitor output and a Centronics parallel interface is unfortunate.

The Compass also has two sockets marked telephone line and telephone audio. They have been designed to work with an integral modem which is provided with the standard machine in the United States. So far, the UK approved modem is not available, but should be 'in the near future'. It will add £800 to the price of the basic model or £1,060 if you purchase it as an upgrade to your existing machine.

In the States Grid operates a service known as Grid Central which not only provides a means of obtaining software but also for the roving micro user to use it as yet another storage device. When out and about you can send a data file to Grid Central and download it again back in the office. The intention is to offer a similar service in the UK.

If you think the Compass is effective, take a deep breath. The software costs extra. The Grid integrated management software costs £785 and includes spreadsheet, text editor, filing system, graphics generator and printer and plotter driving routines.

The MSDOS operating system sets you back £135 and applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar will cost £435 each.

To take advantage of these applications you will need the disk drive unit. The basic 256K machine can realistically hold two applications together with their associated data files and the operating system. But you can unload files to disk and upload new applications, as you need them, into bubble memory.

The available MSDOS software covers all the top-selling titles. Apart from the ones already mentioned MultiPlan, R:Base 4000, dBase II, Condor (series 20-3) and TK!Solver are offered. The full range of Microsoft languages can also be run on the machine.

As with a Rolls-Royce, if you need to ask the price you can't afford it. The same epithet must surely apply here. The basic machine plus Grid's own software, plus single disk drive and integral modem will set you back £9,000. Not surprisingly, the manufacturer sees its buyers as top executives in top companies for whom £9,000 for an executive style status symbol is small change.

But does the price justify the quality of the product? The answer must be no. Certainly, it is well made and looks very, very nice. But inside the box is a computer that offers little more than the Sharp PC5000 (Issue 51) priced at £1,374 or the Gavilan which costs something like twice that.

The innovative screen technology is undoubtedly the major attraction. But the slow access times on the bubble memory, the user violent menu system and the need for an external power source are major disincentives.

If anyone ever says that you'll never get a 'real proper' computer that you can stick in your pocket, just drag out a Husky Hunter. A shade under 22cm long, 16cm deep and 3.5cm high (8.5" x 1.5"), it'll fit in a largish pocket. Inside is a CMOS version of a Z80, 48K of ROM, 208K of RAM and a programmable serial port. Most remarkably it also has CP/M on board.

The Hunter runs an operating system called DEMOS, which provides all the necessary functions, supports an enhanced Basic and in addition manages the four 48K banks of RAM so that the user has a 48K space with the remainder set up to look like a reasonably large disk drive.

Physically the Husky Hunter would look at home on a tank. It is completely solid, no moving parts, expensive, and obviously aimed squarely at people who get cold and wet in faraway places.

Apart from the sheer chip-density inside which must be about as high as you can get, the main reason for the solid, weighty feel is that the casing is diecast aluminium, and quite a bit of it. It's sealed with moisture-repellent plastics and, apart from the battery-compartment lid which is threaded and sealed with an O-ring, there's no way in for anything.

It's a little smaller, and unlike either the Tandy 100 or the NEC, the keyboard is more like a calculator with small square keys arranged in qwerty-layout. The rectangular matrix allows a couple of extra keys to be fittd in without making the whole thing either too big or too packed, but will slow down any moderately-competent typist.

The screen has eight lines of 40 characters, the bottom line being used for eight function key labels, and the actual function keys being provided as Control-1 to Control-8. The actual LCD itself is rather more deeply-recessed than usual, behind fairly thick acrylic faceplate, which is almost as touch as the metal casing.

On the left-hand end is a 25-way D-conncetor (male) which provides the RS-232 serial port, and on the back is an unusual 4-way female connector called a LEMO socket, which is used as a single-bit port for use with bar-code wands.

The rest of the case is almost featureless except for the battery-compartment cover, a metal disc 2cm in diameter with a slot for a coin across the face which screws down to form a watertight seal, and a threaded hole in either end of the case, into which a wrist-strap can be screwed.

There are quite a few differences between the Husky and other portables, some of which derive from the problems of making the machine really tough, others simply good ideas. One of the format is the contrast-control for the LCD. On most true portables this is a simple thumbwheel, which is all that's needed. However, any additional openings in the case of the Husky Hunter would be unacceptable, so the designers have made this a 'control-UP/control-DOWN' function of the cursor-keys, which solves the probem neatly by involving the CPU and making the entire keyboard 'soft'.

Another feature which falls in the category of 'good ideas' is also a function of the cursor keys, which are organised so that their shifted values cause the whole screen to scroll, thus turning the LCD from a 40-by-8 window into a full-sized 80-by-24 virtual screen.

If not particularly well edited or checked, it is very comprehensive, well organised, and as useable as any I've seen. If anything, it's a bit too comprehensive; for example, not only is the complete instruction set for the NSC800 (CMOS Z80) listed, but so is every possible hex value for each instruction, including all the possible addressing modes and register usage.

Admittedly, using these tables you could write and enter quite large and sophisticated machine code programs as data statements in Basic programs... but who would be masochistic enough or sufficiently desperate to try?

Apart from that slight case of overkill, the documentation is as complete as anyone could want.

Apart from the specialised functions described, the operation of the machine is much the same as any other CP/M computer. The Hunter comes complete with WordStar, and if you want to load it up, Multiplan, SuperCalc, dBase I and anything else you can fit. Whether it's actually worth doing so is something else.

The main problem with the Husky Hunter is that although there may be a complete CP/M computer in there, as big or bigger than many, the keyboard is so slow to react that it's virtually unusable.

It's not possible to examine it, but underneat I'm sure there's a membrane-keyboard, obviously of considerably higher quality than those on the Spectrum or Atari 400, but substantially the same and suffering many of the same faults... lack of precision, a rather rubbery feel and so on.

Surely British ingenuity can produce a totally-submersible keyboard or keyswitch which is as responsive as any other keys?

When you're writing, you don't want to think about the physical process of pressing the keys... it's quite enough trying to put the apostrophes in the right place.

If the Husky Hunter didn't have 'proper' software, thus leading you to expect a given performance from it, perhaps it would be less frustrating.

If the machine couldn't handle WordStar I'm sure you wouldn't miss it, provided such software as was available worked and wasn't obviously limited by the hardware.

That isn't to say that the Husky Hunter isn't fit to use... in the right place it would be almost perfect, but though it may be able to handle the 'ordinary' CP/M applications, I don't feel that it's best suited to them, simply because they are mostly heavily keyboard-bound. For the same reasons, the Husky Hunter won't make a good program-development machine.

The Husky Hunter would appear to be best applied as a kind of alter-ego for a regular machine, running large data-gathering or in-field interpretation programs. Any such programs would have to be designed with the Husky Hunter in mind, and since the keyboard is so much less responsive than an ordinary one, it would be a good idea to make extensive use of single-key commands and function keys.

With this proviso, and since there really isn't a lot of choice if you want a machine which you can generally abuse and expect to continue working, I'm sure the Hunter will prove quite popular among those professions which need this kind of quality.

The Canon X-70 is the cheapest in this collection of off-beat portable offerings and is also not yet available in the UK.

The word is that the price will be about £250 and Canon will offer a colour printer/plotter, an RS232C expansion box and both ROM and RAM cards for the X-07. The X-07's strongest suit is not in peripherals, but rather what comes standard with the machine.

The X-07 is a collection of good ideas that seem to have found a halfway house inside a portable that can't hope to make the most use of them. These good ideas include the development of credit card sized 'program cards' which act as either ROM-based programs or a battery-based extension to the existing 8K CMOS RAM (expandable to a maximum of 16K inside the machine), the option of using an optical link to send data over a short distance, and the foresight to include a volume control on the side of the machine.

A major problem with all these great ideas is that there isn't a great deal you can make of them on the X-07. The size and nature of the machine's keyboard (small hard-plastic keys similar to those on Tandy's old colour computer) and the 20-character screen severely limit any use the machine might have as a portable notebook in the NEC PC-8201 or Tandy Model 100 league, although the credit card plug-in ROMs would be a great place to offer quick and simple applications programs for just such a notebook.

The optical coupling communications systems would be a great way of doing away with all the cabling usually involved in data transfer, if the X-07 had any decent programs to allow you to collect data in such a way that it would be worth transferring. Although Canon are offering such programs, there are limitations imposed by the hardware.

Having said all this, I still must admit that the X-07 is a great deal of fun to use. As long as you don't take the machine too seriously, you're not likely to be frustrated by the limitations I've pointed out. It has an excellent implementation of Microsoft Basic, provides much better facilities for playing games than dedicated Game and Watch cards, includes a built-in real-time clock you can use as an alarm and handles both sound and graphics.

If you're in need of a portable for developing programs in Basic that you later might want to transfer to a bigger machine, then the X-07 might even have some practical applications for you. It also has a built-in numeric keypad that lets you use the machine as a calculator, with an alternative set of values for some keys on the right of the machine.

A large international character set is included in the ROM, so you can incorporate anything from French to Japanese in your programs, and two parts of the character set can be redefined as your own graphics characters. A demonstration cassette that comes with the machine makes great use of this in the form of a car-race game, including lots of on-screen traffic and even a detailed pit-stop scene in the middle of the course, all using user-defined graphics.

Storage is provided either in the built-in CMOS RAM, optional memory card or onto cassette tape. The data is stored by being output to a number of pre-defined devices, including the screen, the optical coupler, several types of printer, a cassette recorder and a RAM file. A directory of files in RAM is displayed with the DIR command.

The documentation is comprehensive and helpful. It comprises three small paperback books: the User's Guide, a Programming for Beginners Book and a Basic Reference Manual.

The User's Guide is a 135-page document that includes explanations of how to best use the hardware as well detailed pin configurations for the cassette connector, the serial port connector, the parallel port connector and the 40-pin extension connector.

The Programming for Beginners book is a step-by-step introduction to Basic programming, including a thorough discussion of flow-charting and lots of small example programs that well illustrate the capabilities of the machine.

The Canon X-07 is the ZX81 of the portable computer world. It is cheap and quite competent in Basic programming, but it doesn't have too many real or serious applications. You get the definite impression that this machine would have been a real trail-blazer had it been released in the UK a year ago.

The three portables in this Pro-Test aren't directly comparable; they're all designed to do different things at different prices.

Grid's machine is a 'price is no object' portable micro in the Ferrari class, using the best flat-screen technology American money can buy and tested by the military and even the astronauts aboard the space shuttle.

As a portable business micro it's perhaps a bit over the top. It costs more than most business machines (actually about two times as much as most business machines), and you're paying the price for state of the art.

The Husky Hunter is much, much cheaper but also offers portable business applications. Its problem, however, is in being too much of a good thing - it's too small. The size has forced the keyboard to be squashed into such a small space that only a hard-top or a spongy keyboard can be used. And even the hard-top keys that Husky has opted for are not really of the quality you'd want for typing.

Unlike the Grid, which is really an extravagance, the Husky does have its place. The fact that it's built like a tank and can survive all kinds of weathers means that its ideal for data-entry in the field (and as such has been taken on by the Ministry of Defense), particularly with its CP/M operating system compatibility.

The Canon X-07 is, more or less, just there to have fun with. It's difficult to condemn a machine that's such good fun and has so many good ideas built into it. Alright, you can't use it for word processing or compiler much of a database or develop a spreadsheet with it, but if the price was a bit lower it would be worth buying as an enchanting and instructional pastime.