Review of the Dauphin DTR-1

The good:

• Lightweight
• Portable
• Runs Windows 3.1 well
• 100% PC/ISA compatible
• Pen interface
• Very modular
• Very inexpensive now
• Excellent battery life (Eight hours!) for $400

The bad:

• Poor battery life (2.5 hours)
• Cheap keyboard, stiff keys
• No pen silo
• Kinda slow (40x faster than XT (Norton SI 8.0))
• Limited RAM and hard drive space (42MB fixed disk)
• Poor suspend mode (10 hours max)
• No PCMCIA slot(s)
• Slow internal modem

The ugly:

• The way some colors "swim" on the monochrome LCD

Overall:

• If you can tolerate the Dauphin's faults, it will serve you well in any configuration. Add an external pocket modem and a couple spare batteries ($50/ea, very small) and you have a nice handheld web browser. With any computer, it is a compromise of portability, power, and price, and I am pleased to say the Dauphin effectively manages all three.