Momenta Not Ready for Prime Time

One of the editors recently had an opportunity to work extensively with the Momenta computer. It has a lot of exciting ideas and innovations, but it’s not ready for prime time. The basic description of the machine appeared in the November, 1991, issue.

The most interesting aspect of the Momenta Computer is the software. It is a dual-boot machine, booting up either with Microsoft Windows 3 or with the Momenta Environment, which is a graphical pen interface layer on top of MS-DOS 5.0. Windows and the Momenta environment are mutually exclusive. When you switch from Momenta to Windows or vice versa, the machine reboots.

The Windows side of the software is just that: Microsoft Windows. The pen behaves like a mouse — you can double-tap to open applications, drag the mouse cursor with the pen, pull down menus with the pen, and so forth.

The Momenta environment is a proprietary graphical user interface designed for pen input and control. It has some unique features such as a command compass, which is a pie-menu with options for edit, cut, paste, copy, and delete. The menu appears as a background function behind appropriate icons or fields on the screen. For example, when you’re writing characters in a field, you can press the side button on the pen which brings up the command compass, allowing you to perform editing operations on what you’ve written.

The Momenta environment is an ambitious software system. It includes a bunch of bundled applications, including a handwriting trainer, fax program, address book and calendar, on-line tutorial, a spreadsheet program, a presentation graphics program, and a text editor/word processor (this application was not ready yet at the time of this review and is to be included in a free update to all current Momenta owners).

Conceptually, the Momenta environment is very elegant. You move from one application to another simply by opening the next application with the pen. The environment feels a bit like multitasking although task-switching is really what’s going on. In theory, the environment supports hand printing in all applications.

But while elegant in concept and theory, the Momenta environment is not ready yet. To put it bluntly, it is virtually unusable in its current implementation. The handwriting recognition is inaccurate, much worse than other handwriting recognition systems that I’ve seen. Even after going through the handwriting trainer program, which requires you to print about 12 screenfulls of characters, the system still interprets my first name “N I C K” as “U L 3 6.” Needless to say, users will not tolerate this level of inaccuracy.

Another serious problem is the accuracy of the pen. The system provides a calibration program, a tedious procedure in which you tap the pen on a bull’s-eye that moves around on the screen, the objective being to ensure that the pen is pointing accurately at objects on the screen. However, the pen is constantly getting out of calibration. For example, application windows have a small box in the upper left corner for closing the window. When the pen gets out of calibration, tapping on the close box has no effect. I had to tap about an 1/8 inch to the left of the box to get the window to close.

These problems are only the tip of the iceberg. Much of the software is buggy. At one point, the sample application menu would start up the calibration program when I tapped on the on-line tutorial. The reflective display provides poor contrast and brightness, making the screen difficult to read except in very bright light. The compass menu, which is designed to appear in the background, is barely visible. To make a long story short, it takes a lot of effort both with your eyes and with the pen to work with this machine. And that is the opposite of the intent of pen-based computing. The one thing that worked well on this machine was the fax modem and the fax software. Sending a fax to the machine was a snap.

As mentioned earlier, the Momenta uses an 80386SX CPU. Compared to other 80386SX systems, the machine seems very slow. This is more a problem with the Momenta software than with the hardware. When running Windows, the performance seems about average for an 80386 system. The machine seems much slower in the Momenta environment.

But perhaps the most surprising problem with this machine is its battery life. Momenta claims to have come up with some innovative power-management techniques for this machine. But my tests indicated otherwise. The batteries lasted no longer than half an hour running a series of numeric and hard disk benchmarks. Two battery packs were supplied with the system and both delivered dismal results for battery life.

The Momenta Computer is a bold and innovative project. But it has been delivered to market too soon. The company needs to fix a lot of problems before it can hope to be competitive, particularly at a price of close to $5000.