Personal Digital Assistants are all the rage in the gadget world.... little computers that can often do almost as much as your desktop computer ... send e-mail, store names, addresses, and phone numbers, connect with online services, some can even view the worldwide web. Many have keyboards, some have little pens you use to write on the screen.... but they're all touted as the next step in the evolution of the laptop computer.
There are literally dozens of them out there, and i couldn't possibly review all of them in a few minutes.... HewlettPackard, Motorola, and sony make them... and ibm will come out with one next year.... I have one of these things.... mine's made by Apple ... its called the Newton MessagePad130. At 8 inches long and three or four inches wide, fits in your hand like a little notebook, but it is one of the larger PDA's on the market. Its also the coolest color... a sort of antique green. Every time I use it, some asks: 'hey do you like that thing? is it really useful? It probably comes as no surprise that I didn't buy the Newton for its utility.... but it has become an indispesible part of my geeky portable technology life which incldes a laptop that seems to weigh around ten pounds.
From what I've seen, the Newton comes closest to actually being able to save folks from having to lug around that heavy laptop. I use my newton to check email, and keep track of my finances, as well as take notes during meetings on the road. Its pretty easy to use.... instead of a keyboard you use a plastic pen to write on a screen that looks kind of like an etch a sketch... the newton then converts your handwriting into text. The handwriting recognition is excellent... a far cry from the original newton a few years ago.... back then, handwriting recognition was so bad that Gary Trudeau and Saturday Night Live both made fun of it. My newton recognized my handwriting right out of the box.
I can also connect to compuserve and the web servers my company maintains using the credit card sized modem that i can also put in with my laptop. The whopping 2 and half megabytes of internal memory is more than twice that of any of the other PDA's on the market. If you're a power user, or a gadget freak, you won't be satisfied with anything less than the Newton or a PDA like it. Everything else just falls short.
So i admit i'm not an average user, and although *I* am ready stop carrying my laptop around, i don't think most people are ready to give up the things they like best about their normal computers: word processing, spread sheets, nice graphics, a big screen. And aside from the Newton, the screens on most PDA's are very hard to read. Apple solved this problem by backlighting the newton's window. You've probably seen some of the other devices that try and pass themselves off as PDA's... they're really more like electronic orgainzers... the most talked about one these days is the Pilot from US Robotics.
The Pilot costs about $350 and it fits in your shirt pocket. You can't actually write on the Pilot's screen like you can with a Newton, and in order to get it to recognize your handwriting, you have to write in a special stenographer-like shorthand that defies description. Its much easier to do all the information entry on your desktop and then transfer it to the pilot. Clearly the Pilot intended to be more of a display device where you can look at your names and appointments.
The other kind of pocket orgainzers look likel little calculators with mini keyboards... the most popular are Sharp's Wizards. They have been around for years... are pretty cheap and replace that Daytimer orgainzer nicely. Its lower tech in some ways, but the newer ones allow you to do many of the things a newton does. I'm not keen on them because the keyboards are really small.... but my colleagues who use them swear by them.
In the end, a PDA is not for everyone. They may well be the wave of the future, and devices like the Newton MessagePad130 are certainly leading the way... but for now, the real PDA's are really more aimed at power users... especially connsidering my newton costs 800 bucks. The PDA wanna-be's like the Pilot are over-priced organizers that may satisfy gadget freaks, but simply don't live up to their name. I suspect most users will be satisfied with a cheaper electronic organizer like the Wizard from sharp. for me, though, the MessagePad 130 has been a godsend.... and my laptop is now getting very lonely.
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