Written: 8/19/2000
Written by: Mat Cauthon
Introduction
The PDA. The name "Personal Digital Assistant" probably
conjures up nightmare images of the bulky 1980's organizers with their tiny
keyboards, tiny display, 256k of memory, and not much else. Some people even
say that PDAs aren't very useful, that you would be better off buying a laptop.
Maybe this was true in 1985, skippy, but put away your Starship records and your
Commodore 64 and see what Palm has done to the PDA since Reagan left office.
So What Can a PDA Do For Me?
That's a good question, and there are basically two
responses to it.
What you tell your boss (or spouse):
"This Device will allow me to carry all my phone
numbers, contact information, and important dates and times all in one 5 by 3
inch package. It can automatically download my e-mail to it so I can read it on
the road and even write responses to it. I won't forget a meeting again because
I can have it go off to remind me. I can even download restaurant guides so I
know where to take business prospects out to lunch. There are thousands of
business applications for any one of the Palm devices."
What you tell yourself:
"Sure, I can put all that business crap on there, and
when I'm done with that I can get AvantGo and have it download my favorite
webpages to it, and then I can get some of the thousands of games for the
platform! Maybe I can play some Tetris with the Gambit Game Boy emulator. Or I
can get the Palm Modem for surfing on the run. I'll never be bored on another
outing with the family as long as I have my Palm..."
The Palm line of PDAs pack hundreds of different uses
into a pocket-sized case with a giant (it takes up nearly 90% of the Palm's
surface area) LCD screen. It has a program base of well over 10,000
applications, and it can hotsync to your PC in about one minute to update
anything you've changed via the Palm Desktop software and add any programs
you've told it to upload. All this, and it runs for about a month on two AAA
Batteries.
Next
page: What about Windows CE?
[Page
1]
[Page
2]
[Page
3]
[Page
4]
[Page
5]
[Page
6] [Home]
