Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
Letting it slide
When reading your review of the Planet Computers Astro Slide ( see issue 330, p50), it made me wonder whether Sony Ericsson had missed a trick. Around a decade ago, it produced a phone with a very similar concept called the Xperia Pro, which had a slide-out keyboard. If Sony Ericsson had brought this product up to date with a modern processor, a bigger, better screen, modern cameras and 5G it might have led the field. Just a thought! I M Williams
Live long and prosper
I see that Planet Computers have released a new model. I have an ex-colleague who purchased a Cosmo Communicator to use for emails while travelling to various meetings. When he heard of the new model, he got a little irate. His point, if I can remove the expletives, is that he would have preferred that Planet Computers had released an update to his Android 9 Cosmo before releasing a new model.
This played into my hobby horse about high-end Android devices and their useful lifespan. Samsung is another guilty player in this, with purchasers likely to see no more than one OS update. More important than OS updates, however, are the limited security updates that devices receive.
Apple appears to support its products for as long as the device can physically cope with a new update, but you do pay for this support at the outset. I would happily buy a base iPad Pro but for one thing: the storage, 256GB, just isn’t enough. I need at least 512GB and preferably 1TB, but I’m now a poor pensioner and couldn’t afford to spend £1,500 plus on a tablet! Chris Moxham Editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: Chris, I hear you on all counts. In fairness to Planet Computers, if it doesn’t produce new products then it doesn’t get fresh income and, well, we know what happens after that! I know that it’s keenly aware of the need to support existing customers, but it has to balance its resources. There is hope regarding longevity of Android phones too! For example, Samsung explicitly addresses this with the Galaxy S22 range ( see p68).
Hydrogen future
As a subscriber and hydrogen energy system researcher, I thought I should clarify some of the comments in Chris Moxham’s letter ( see issue 331, p24).
Chris questions the use of lithiumion batteries in motor vehicles. There are a number of factors driving the current focus on battery-powered electric vehicles (BEV) over hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEV). First, the round-trip efficiency of charging and using a BEV is over 90%, while that of a FCEV is only around 50-60%; for comparison, an internal combustion engine vehicle is 30-35% efficient. Second, the technology for producing and using hydrogen is at a much earlier stage than batteries. Hence cost is also a significant factor, with current pre-tax cost of hydrogen at about £11 for the same amount of energy as a litre of petrol or diesel.
Both hydrogen production and the fuel cells require rare earth elements, so the mining benefits Chris highlights aren’t as significant as might be thought. Where hydrogen does help is in range for a vehicle. Increasing the range of a BEV requires a bigger, heavier battery, whereas increasing the range of a FCEV only requires a larger hydrogen tank, which doesn’t add significantly to the weight of the vehicle.
Sadly, Chris’s hope that using hydrogen will reduce sea-level rise is not correct. To make green hydrogen we split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but to use the energy the hydrogen is combined with oxygen to make water. In effect this is the same as the rain cycle: water evaporates from the sea to form clouds but then falls as rain, which flows down rivers back to the sea. So only the amount of hydrogen in the “clouds” state is removed, which will not have any effect on the sea level. Dr Ian Madley
printer purchase. It’s not acceptable to be unable to scan when an ink cartridge runs out or to have to buy chipped cartridges from the manufacturer. Can PC Pro include this information in all future printer reviews, to help readers avoid this shady practice and poor attitude to customers? There’s no way for us to know when buying a printer, but it’s easy for you to include it in the testing and warn us accordingly. Simon Hughes
PC Pro editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: Thanks for the suggestion, Simon. I’ll pass this on to our main reviewer of printers and see if we can incorporate it into our next group test in particular.
Stuff and nonsense
I was intrigued to read Jon Honeyball’s column regarding a keyboard stuffer ( see issue 329, p108). A client came to me with a similar problem in 2015. It had a scientific instrument (an FT-IR spectrometer) on which it wanted to trigger a read sequence from a close contact start on a connected automatic sampler. The problem was that the FT-IR software on the PC needed a specific sequence of function keys and Return key strokes with intervals to be able to record the spectrometer results.
In steps the Arduino Micro. It can act as a standard keyboard and it was possible, with simple programming, to instruct the sequence required. So the closed contact sends F5, waits a predetermined time, sends a Return key to clear the dialog and then sends F6. Job done. Bill Macpherson
Contributing editor Jon Honeyball replies: That sounds interesting, but I was looking for an off-the-shelf solution, just to be lazy! You can do this with a Raspberry Pi, too, with the keyboard controller add-on, but it’s a faff to program it so it’s usable by my musician friend…