GRiD GRiDPad 1910

I own a GRiDPad 1910, upon which I run PC-GEOS 2.0 with Graffiti. I wrote a Guide to installing GEOS on the GRiDPad 1910 which will help you get to the same place. Once it runs GEOS, it functions as sort of a giant PDA. There's a great deal of old PC-GEOS software which can be run on it, and it has a 640x400 monochrome CGA display.

As it stands now, my pad has the GRiD Dos 3.3 (Must be a hack of MS-DOS?) on the 20mb (probably 21mb, type 2 in AT standards) internal IDE disk. I also have Loaded Palm Connect, which is Geoworks 2.0 plus a fairly bad handwriting recognition library and three apps; A notepad, a scheduler, and an address book. I also loaded the original Graffiti handwriting recognition program, later made famous by the Palm Pilot.

In this configuration, the pad is nearly identical to the machine known as the Zoomer; Sold by AST after buying GRiD, sold by Tandy as the Casio Z-PDA 7000, and also as the GRiDPad 2390. There's more information about it elsewhere on the web, and this page isn't really about the zoomer; It's about making a gridpad act like a zoomer with a bigger screen, more disk, and dramatically less battery life.

For comparison's sake, though, let me show you why when I bothered to carry anything around, I carried my GRiDPad 1910 and not my GRiDPad 2390:

To sum up; The display capabilities are much improved on the GRiDPad. They're both monochrome (1bpp) but the higher resolution of the pad makes it worthwhile. The pad's also a lot heavier and a lot bigger; That's obviously good and bad. The zoomer fit in my pants pocket, being about the size of a paperback, but I have large hands and my hand cramped using it. A Pilot would obviously be even worse, even if it does have a better set of software and more CPU power. Both the Zoomer and the GRiDPad are XT-class machines; The GRiDPad has considerably more memory.

The Zoomer has more versatility in that it has a true PCMCIA Type II slot, although you can't put anything with much power drain in it. The GRiDPad can only use five volt ATA-FLASH cards. No SRAM cards, of course.

The GRiDPad does have another severe advantage over the Zoomer; A 20mb IDE hard drive. This can also be expanded, but how far I'm not sure. (Hopefully, I Can put this 250mb Quantum I have into it.) The machine will boot to a rom drive if there is no hard disk, or to a ATA-FLASH card (known as A:.)

The GRiDPad can be upgraded to contain an internal modem; Somewhere around here I have the 2400 baud MNP 5 modem from my last GRiDPad (which tended to eat the inverter for the backlight.)

Finally, after some of the specifications I put an asterisk - That's because the GRiDPad 1910 has an expansion bus out of the bottom of it. I don't know if there's a second serial port (I need to order a book from Tandy) but there IS a floppy bus and a parallel port in there. I don't know if GRiD ever made a dock station, but one was certainly planned for.