Do you own a PDA or a PDA/Smartphone hybrid (any PalmOS, RIM, PocketPC, Linux & some Psion/Symbian-based phones — note, some smartphones are not PDAs). Come in and vote.Note: This poll requires javascript to both view and vote for.
Poll: Do you own a PDA or a Smartphone?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
…but I gotta confess I don’t use it much.
Actually most of my colleagues and friends (I’d say, some 70%) usually play around with their new PDAs for a few weeks and then forget them in the cradle for days.
i own a pure smartphone which one is that in the poll?
The second option. Hybrid means “PDA” and “phone” in one.
I have a Sharp Zaurus C1000, running OpenZaurus w/ Linux Kernel 2.4.20.
This is because there are some smartphones that ARE NOT PDAs. Like the Sharp 3G series, that are technically smartphones, but they are NOT PDAs too.
I own a pure pda.. psion netbook and a palm m500. I rarely use the palm nowadays but I use my netbook a lot.
Blackberry 7100t – I should of got a Treo 650.
Handspring Visor which I rarelly use these days.
I have a 1992 copytight HP100LX PDA… Seeing as the 100LX and 200LX were amoung the most popular PDAs ever and they run MS-DOS, they have plenty of *useful* software available…
I have tried Palm, WinCE and even an Agenda (Linux) PDA, but nothing beats the 100LX in sheer usefulness…
I can program on it using TurboC, use the built-in database app and Lotus 123, plus all the old DOS games that work on it Doesnt run DooM though
…
Just the best PDA Ive ever used…
Broken Palm Zire 31. The screen broke, so the whole thing is orange; Palm won’t do anything about it; and CompUSSR won’t take it back.
$
Get a Tungsten E2. Best deal right now regarding PDAs. Or, this one: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=AXIM-400-K4&cat=PDA
How about options such as…
“I own a PDA but never use it”
“I own a phone with tons of junk “smart stuff” that I never use and wish wasn’t there”
I have both those situations. My cell phone isn’t a full pda/phone thing it’s a SE T610, but it’s got enough stuff that it’s far from a phone, and could really use a massive feature axing.
I use a good ‘ol styled Nokia 6610i mobile phone.
& have no pda.
I actually prefer to have dedicated devices for dedicated work than having all features cramped into one
just my thought
Where is the both option? I own a Treo 180g and a DELL AximX3 (the former is used as my mobile phone and the latter is used as a GPS).
Planning on getting a Palm Treo 650 due to being always on the go, it’s small but still very functional, Quad band so it’s a world phone and has good reviews.
I’ve had a Palm IIIxe, original Zire, but just bought a SonyEricsson P910a last time … it was time to take the plunge.
I have an old Palm Pilot Pro a friend of mine gave to me years ago. I dust it off every few months to change its batteries, other than that I never found much use for it. My cell phone does phone calls, and that’s about it.
It’s funny, I always glance at smartphones and PDAs and think about how cool they are, but I can’t imagine anything useful I’d do with them.
No, it’s not color, it only has 8MB of RAM, and it runs a dated version of the PalmOS (3.5.3), but it’s able to take a quick color picture or two with the add-on PalmPle camera I found for US$25, it dials into my ISP via PPP (a V.90 m105-compatible ClipModem was US$1.50 + S&H on eBay) so I can telnet into Pine and read my mail or run an older version of Xiino for web browsing, it lets me run the freeware DB database so I can keep track of things (home inventory, local restarant ratings, etc.), it has a couple of nice quick drawing tools for when I’m trying to come up with design ideas at work, and it has enough room in it for a couple dozen games in addition to the above.
Oh yeah, and it does a good job of storing phone numbers, addresses, and various reminders as well…
I had one, but it was useless. It was a neat toy for a few weeks. After the newness wore off, I found myself using other things for what the pda was supporsed to do. The pda was just to general perpose to do what I wanted correctly.
In the end all it was used for was for work to invade my personal life.
i have an SPV C500 (Windows SmartPhone 2003SE Based) Smartphone, and a Sendo X (Symbian Series60 Based) Smartphone, and i also have a HP Jornada 680e running WinCE HP/PRO 4.11, one of the ones with a keyboard, and have a HP 100LX running DOS lol
I own a smartphone AND a PDA
Sony errection t610 and palm zire 72
Very happy with my Treo 650. Forgot when I used my old Tungsten T3 last time. Treo is always with me – phone, internet and mail in my pocket.
-Palm One Treo 600/650 (i do not use the 600 anymore)
-Sharp Zaurus SL6000
-Sharp Zaurus 5000D
-Palm Tungsten T3 (with wireless GPS/TOMTOM)
I have a Visor deluxe for 3 years now …
Best thing i bought. Use it for all my
adresses ,apointments and things to do.
In bonus i have a few games on it when
i am in a waiting room for my car or else.
Best thing since sliced bread !!!
I have a PocketPC I never use, an older WinCE device I never use, an even older Palm I never use, and a Symbian hybrid that I only use the cellphone functions of.
So thats 4, but none that I use.
I own a pocketpc, and carry it around with me everyday to my university because of the campus-wide wlan. It’s nice to be able to check some *important* things during class (for exemple osnews [thanks for the nice small-browser version!]).
I also own a hp jornada 680, with linux on it, but just got it 2 weeks ago, haven’t done more than boot linux and kidding around on the shell.
I have an X-pilot MA1000 I picked up to use for an application I wrote at work. The morons who make it, rebadge it and resell it won’t give me a copy of the sdk, so I can’t debug my application properly. So its junk, except for the large screen, and MS RDP.
Smartphones:
Current: Siemens SX66 (HTC Blue Angel) – runs WM2003SE
Past: SonyEricsson P800 – runs Symbian 6 with UIQ 2
Past: iPaq 3870 – runs WM2003
Past: Apple Newton 2100 – runs NewtonOS 2.1
I will never buy a pure PDA again
Had a Nokia 8250 and Dell X3 – now I have a TREO 600. Will NEVER go back, changed my life, love it, pry it from my cold dead fingers type of dedication. Convergence of phone and data at it’s best.
In order of acquisition:
* Palm III
* Handspring Visor Deluxe
* Sony Clie N710C (N711C after ROM upgrade)
* HP Jornada 525
* Psion Series 5mx
* HP iPaq h5455
* Apple Newton Messagepad 2100
* Sony Clie NX80V
* HP iPaq h4700
Obviously I don’t still own them all, but I am of a mind to agree with David MacNeill (Pen Computing) that convergence isn’t always a good thing. Give me some bluetooth peripherals and I’ll take a PAN over a lousy smartphone any day!
i own 2 pdas
a casio pocket viewer 450 and a palm tungten e
i use the casio as my pda (contacts, todo, schedule). it´s rock solid, bateries last a year and a half and is comfortable (it keep going, even under a rain!)
now i use my tungten just for ebook and documents to go while i’m on the go (just to study for the university on the subway or bus)
But I own a Danger Sidekick. The funny thing is that I hear everyone in the press bitching about how hard it can be to use some of these phones, that theyre too hard to set up and make work with your computer, and then I wonder if they’ve ever tried one of these…
If apple made a cellphone, this would be close to how they would do it. It doesn’t even need a touchscreen its so well designed.
I’ve got a zire 31, had it before the ipods came out, use it mostly for mp3’s and I’ve coded the odd calculator on it, use it daily for my scheduling, and to track progress on my projects, but don’t use it for much more than that.
I’ve got a General Magic DataRover 840 communicator running Magic Cap, and I love it. It has such a well thought out interface.
I love hacking on it… who knows I might even use it as a PDA one day.
I’m still using my old Palm m100, since very few of the newer ones come with a serial (RS232) connection.
Typically I use it for router programming (via the RS232 console port), and remote debugging (debugging output to RS232), in addition to the normal note taking, address book, todo list type stuff…
Sony Clie NX60 to be exact. But, I use the (admittedly limited) pseudo-PDA functions of my Motorola V551 phone more and more every day. I’ve always got it with me, it’s much smaller than the PDA, and the screen has a sufficiently high resolution to be easy on the eyes. That is something my old phone (Siemens S56) didn’t have going for it.
I do occasionally bring my PDA with me when I know I’ll have a lot of downtime to play games, but as little as I use the datebook and addressbook, I’m better off with my phone. Besides, my PDA doesn’t have a camera or bluetooth but my phone has both, and I have WAP internet wherever I have a signal. WAP is very limited, but it works with the sites I visit most: OSNews, Yahoo Mail, Google, and my bank.
The best part is, the phone syncs wirelessly via bluetooth with my new Mac, whereas I would have to plug in my PDA.
I have a Dell Axim X3i. It is a very handy little unit. Though I am thinking about upgrading to the HP Ipaq that has those little thumb keyboards on them. Would make some things easier.
Sony Clie PEG-N770C/U – Primarily use it for storing passwords and logins, keep track of birthdates and so on.
Palm M100 – don’t use it much.
I don’t have a cellphone (I actually have a SonyErickson T310 my brother gave away to me, but I never use it, it’s always OFF, in a shelf).
PDAs in our house:
PalmV
Sony Clie TH-55
Dell x50v
Dell X5-Advanced
Sony Clie T-615C (my husband’s)
I never use any of them, but I am geek enough to have them and mess around with them sometimes.
Used for surfing the net whilst on the can. (guess where I’m writing this from?)
😉
iPAQ keeps me regular…
Time to wipe!
I have a Palm Tungsten E, a HP ipaq 2200, and a HP Jornada 680. I use all of them, but not for the same things. The Palm is mainly for eBooks, the ipaq for schedule and contacts, and the Jornada is my laptop replacement when I go on the road.
Eugenia,
I too have a 615C, barely have ever used it. Just always found pencil and paper more useful. And now it’s probably worthless so selling it is pointless. Would like to try to get it working with my mac, no go there yet, no “it just works action” there. Worste money ever spent, buy soemthing to make life better, and it collects dust.
I think it would have been much better if it had a keyboard, and hooking it into my computer was like hooking up a mass storage device, and just have folders with things like all the note files I made, and have them in just text form, so I could just drag them to the computer. The having to use a program to get stuff off it was a major drawback. Wish companies would make more things like dumb mass storage devices.
>Would like to try to get it working with my mac, no go there yet,
It works perfectly with the Mac, using the “Missing Sync” syncing software ($25). In fact, my husband uses it with his Mac exclusively, not with a PC.
Can’t live home without it.
They all suck. The ones with features I want (decent amounts of space and no obnoxious overgrown OS) are too expensive considering the expendable nature they’d take under my ownership (I’d lose and break them).
When you can get a PDA for $20 with a nice screen, good writing recognition (the trouble with the cheap ones is their insensitive screen), and 128+MB of space, then I will get one!
Don’t even start me on the phones… All I want my phone to do is store numbers and have a pretty background!
Treo 650 and a Zaurus 5500, got it all covered.
None of the above, thankfully. All i want from my cellphone is good battery life and the ability to store and synchronize my contacts. Everything else is fluff.
Eugenia,
I figured it would be something like that. Don’t know if I care to spend 25 bucks for something I don’t use.
I have a Zire 72
my 4th Palm
and some crappy samsung sprint phone that my job pays for
I picked up a Treo 600 pretty cheap from eBay and it’s awesome….well, it became awesome only once I’d cracked it open and put a layer of aluminium foil over the battery wire to stop the really bad call interference – the things we do….hehe. I’m enjoying being back in the world of Palm. WM2003 can be very flaky whereas Palm is rock solid.
Previously..
XDA II: Woeful. Reset on me all the time. P.O.S.
XDA I: Great device and surprisingly can take quite a beating
Sony Clie NR70V: Cool…but chunky. My last non-phone PDA.
Compaq iPaq 3135: Mono only but otherwise good…but chunky, especially with the SilverSlider CF jacket
Palm IIIe LE: My first intro to Palm. Not bad. Awesome battery life from a couple of AAA’s
HP 100LX: Solid DOS machine. A few people have even got these things to run Win 3.11!
I’ve played with a friends’ Symbian phone. I found it to be pretty underwhelming considering the hype I’d been hearing about it. I’ll stick with Palm for a while I think…
Zaurus SL-C750 here!
Dell Axim X30…maybe move on to a smartphone eventually but prefer PDA n phone seperate..much easier for me
i think most owners of PDAs here would appreciate the “Have a PDA, don’t use it because it’s just an expensive toy” option.. every time something cool comes out, i always buy it and then end up not using it because the damned things are anti-productive no matter how you actually want to use them.
I got a Zire 31; its a nice little contraption and its not too expensive but, as a few people have noted, for many of us these things are just fancy toys for a few weeks. I just use mine as an mp3 player now but if I could find some software to write C++ or Java and compile it on the PDA I might use it more again.
If anyone knows some good free software for Palm I’d like to know about it, I want to make my Zire useful again.
Treo 600? Rock solid?! I have to reset mine (hard reset) two or three times a day. Heck, you know something’s up when the stylus is *specially designed* so you can use it to reset the phone (dead giveaway, that). One out of two attempts to connect to GPRS it fails and never wakes up.
But I love it anyway. It’s perfect for my jobs – notes of things to do from one place to another – mobile email is fantastic (I have an IMAP server running at home which aggregates all my email, I log in via Squirrelmail webmail when I’m at a PC, and via my Treo when I’m not.
I have had a issue with cellular phones. To the great irratation of my family & friends I have never liked the notion to be reached all the time. But since I got Qtek with built-in cellular phone capability I can live with having the phone on, for the most part. Actually this is my second generation of QTek.
So everybody is happy I got a portable computer to mess around with and my friends can reach me when they want….
Sometime I’m thinking of replacing PocketPC with Linux, any decade now…
…but I sold them both because I wanted to wait for Cobalt. Now it seems I will have to wait forever. But at least my memory has improved a bit (first couple of months, I was really lost without my to-do list).
“Treo 600? Rock solid?! I have to reset mine (hard reset) two or three times a day.”
Bummer. Mine’s fine though
If you haven’t already, check out TreoCentral – http://discussion.treocentral.com/forumdisplay.php?f=58
I’ve found solutions to most issues I’ve come across. The fix for the “call interference” issue was a godsend.
I’ve got a Zaurus SL6000, and a SE K700i. The K700’s not really a smart phone, but it’s got calender and contacts that sync bluetooth or IrDA to my desktop/laptop/pda.
The phone goes everywhere with me – it’s small, fit’s in a the pocket of my jeans, has a camera and plays MP3’s.
The Zaurus is something different – it’s not heavy & bulky like a laptop, so if I need real connectivity on the move I’ll take the Z along as well (but only if I’m taking a bag). It comes in handy for proper net access on the move (which is where all the smart phones fall down) – a real browser, ftp, VPN access to the company network, proper email client and fast WIFI. It’s a godsend for use on the train from home up to London, as our trains have free WIFI on them, and on the beach as Brighton beach is covered by a free WIFI network as well.
I guess they’re for different things – the PDA provides almost the full spectrum of PC/Laptop functionality in a smallish package, while still giving you a fairly decent 640×480 screen and the option of a proper keyboard/mouse and wireless or wired networking (the Zaurus supports USB ethernet adaptors). The phone, well, it gives you primitive networking – last resort email access, a browser that will work with Google (just about), ICQ and the other less techie stuff that you can use every day (SMS, voice calls, etc). In a seriously portable package – but the compromises for the tiny phone form factor mean it’s not ideal for the sort of things a PDA excels at.
I think I’m waffling a bit – to sum up…it’s nice to keep the PDA and the phone separate, so you can have the best of both worlds. Tiny phones that don’t bulk out your pockets when you’re in the pub, and the option to carry a PDA that can talk to the phone to provide a better interface for more demanding tasks.
Just my opinion of course
(also got an SL5500 and a VTech Helio – I do wish they’d sort out PDA battery life as 6 hours worse than the life of my first GSM cell phone back in ’95).
I for one depend on my PDA. 🙂
Yep, me too. I love my PocketPC even though I never thought that I wanted or needed one. Eventually I picked one for a couple of development projects that I had running through my head and ended up using it for just about everything.
Incidentally, I *highly* recommend getting a device with both Wifi and Bluetooth. They make it a lot more useful. I’m looking forward to the day that High Quality Audio BT Headphones come down in price.
I’ve had a Palm Vx, and a Windows 2003 Pocket PC smartphone. I never really got any use out of either of them. My mobile phone is just a simple Nokia which can do calls and SMS messages, and GPRS WAP for train times. If I want to do “proper” computer stuff I’ll use a “proper” computer! I can see that for many people they can be very useful, but I am not one of those people!
The one true smartphone!
I own a multiplicty of PDAs(ok, I’m/was a PDA junkie…)
I still use my old reliable Palm IIIx the most as of the PDAs I own it has the best easiest/quickest OS support. It also sports a monochrome screen, which I find useful as I like to use it outside a good deal of the time, while even the best color screens in the same conditions are barely useable/induce a great deal of eye strain for extended use in such conditions. (This model was also Upgraded with TRG’s XTRA XTRA Pro 8M RAM/4M(? 8?) Flash “ROM”. BTW: I can also program and generate native code on this in C(OnBoardC) or Pascal(er… forgot the name at present.) Nice GUI. Tons of useful software. By FAR best battery life. (Also own Handspring Prism, Sony Clie n760C, and a couple of others. A handera 310(?) would probably be a nice replacement for the IIIx with SD/compact flash support, higher screen res, while still having a mono screen.)
I also own a few wince(and I do!) devices. These weren’t very good/useful until memory got bumped up in them to at least 32M(RAM). Own a helio, agenda, ebookman(911), RCA/Gemstar REB 1100, and a few others. Pretty much the ebookman and REB 1100 get as much use as the Palm when using them for etexts, the agenda gets used ocassionally, but none of my notebooks have serial ports and I have found the USB/serial port to note be quite enough for use with the agenda,esp. when it come to reflashing the kernel/disk images.
Lastly I also own a Newton. Probably really my favorite. Best handwritten character recognition, mono screen, wifi via standard PC Cards. A good deal of useful software, but poor battery life and not quite as good syncing except on with a mac. (Also it’s a little on the largish/heavyish side.)
Hybrid phones: looked at them. Don’t like them. Battery life is bad enough without using them as a PDA. Digital camera feature could be useful, but that does not require PDA functionality, and in most cases I’d suspect that I’d want a bettery camera anyways. Leave the phones as phones.
I used to have an i300 which was OK for its time, but the screen was always full of grease because the only dialing method was dialing right on the touchscreen. It also could only sync with a serial cable or IR, which meant that I had to reboot to OS9 on my G3 PB to back it up. As you might imagine, I didn’t sync very often. Signal reception was very good, though, and the thing was built like a tank. I bounced off the sidewalk a couple of times and it was still fine. These days, however, I sync the Treo 650 via bluetooth to my G4 PB and I couldn’t be happier. I find myself actually using features.
I’d be up the proverbial creek without my PDA. I need an audible reminder of my appointments/important dates (Including a few meaningful dates/anniversaries (no, I’m not mentioning them
))
I’ve used many PDAs over the years. Smartphones have intrigued me however, my company provides me with my cellphone and they usually go for the basic models (they just recently started offering flip phones).
I use the PDAs for my personal contacts (no personal ones on the company cell), personal calendar, games, reading (ebooks), music (Oggs and MP3s) and movies (MP4 and XviD mainly). Obviously only the modern ones can run the music and movies.
Here is the list in order of acquisition
Sharp PC-3000: XT class mini-notebook (VHS tape sized)with instant on. MS-DOS and PIM built into ROM with 1MB RAM.
Sharp PC-3100: same as above but with 2MB RAM.
Psion series 3a 512K: best d@mn PDA I have ever owned! I liked it so much I bought another one after the first one broke. Running a NEC V30 at 8Mhz and a bunch custom designed chips to help speed up operations. Excellent built-in word processor and spreadsheet for it’s time that were very compatible with Word and Excel/Lotus of their day. Built-in graphical programming language. The best scheduling app I have ever used. I was using this and a pocket modem to remotely manage a group of Netware servers back in 94.
Casio Cassiopeia E-100: My first Windows CE/Pocket PC/Mobile experience. My company briefly flirted with deploying these units. What a nightmare! The number of missed alarms was atrocious and the constant resets with only the built-in apps running was ridiculous. The whole project was scrapped after a short pilot test. It pretty much soured me on the platform.
Sony Clie T615C: borrowed from my wife when I could not reliably hook up my Psion to my then new Powerbook G4 at home. First PalmOS experience. Not as full featured as my Psion in the PIM department but I solid device none the less. A key selling feature was being able to run my old LucasArts adventures games (ScummVM) but the music in the games was too great.
Palm Tungsten T3: I couldn’t resist the clearance price and my wife was needing her Clie back. Picked up a piece of software (Pocket Tunes) that plays the music from my LucasArts games well thus letting me enjoy them to their fullest. The calendar app is pretty good and quite close to the Agenda app on the Psion. Unit plays movies well thanks to The Core Movie Player.
I own both a PDA and a smartphone, I would like to have the option for both.
I don’t know about some of you guys. If you can’t find a useful purpose for your PDA, either you’re not trying hard enough, or your too stuck on paper.
When I bought my first PDA summer of 2001, I was in heaven. I’m all about paperless, and that Visor was a godsend. I pushed it to its 2MB limits, and then bought a Zire 31. I use it for all the usual stuff (addresses, appointments, to-dos), plus balancing all my finances, keeping picturs, reading e-books, listenting to OGGs, playing a few games, and keeping a few AvantGo pages. I wouldn’t want to combine the phone and PDA into one unit because I change phones more frequently than my PDA, and I’d like to have some choice in which model I buy. Conversely, I usually just upgrade my phone to whatever is free, since all I pretty much do with it is make calls, and occasionally get on the internet with it.
Some people like paper oranizers, tho…to each their own. But I’m in the ‘pry my PDA from my cold dead fingers’ camp.
I owned a Dell Axim PocketPC, it was a “bonus” given by my previous employer.
At the beginning it was “cool” to have one of this but it quickly ended forgotten on one corner at home. At that moment I had many contacts and appointments but could not find useful the writing method.
Currently I use a paper agenda; it is not so “cool” but at least I can write on it without loosing my head.
David
I have a PDA but rarely use it since my employer no longer allows me to dock it at work…..apparently they are worried about viruses. Strangely enough, I can use a memory stick
If you can’t find a useful purpose for your PDA, either you’re not trying hard enough
I thought PDAs were supposed to make things easier.
While I have a WindowsCE device from way back when, I only played around with it for a few weeks. Using my laptop, Outlook on my office machine, or a calander tacked up on the wall is much more convenient for me than struggling with a PDA.
I have a PocketPC 2002 and it comes in handy for various things. I really want a Palm OS 6 based PDA, but so far no luck.
Hopefully a Palm OS 6 (Cobalt) based PDA will emerge, but in the mean time I am thinking about getting a Windows Mobile 2005 based PDA.
Cellphones, to me, are useful for calling people, having a contact list, getting local movie times and playing MP3s.
I use my PDA for tools I made in Perl, games I am writing in C/C++, To do list, Notes/Text documents on the go, Contacts, E-mail, News and calculators.
“Smartphones have intrigued me however, my company provides me with my cellphone and they usually go for the basic models (they just recently started offering flip phones).”
Youmean, they took another step backwards?
(can’t stand flip phones, candy bars forever!)
A year or two ago I bought a Palm Zire, the original 16MHz 2Mb model. It was affordable, so I thought I might try out this “PDA thing”. If it wouldn’t work out, then at least I wouldn’t have paid a premium price for it.
Turns out it’s the best thing I ever bought, next to my iMac. Runs for ages on its internal battery.
It maintained all of my contacts, appointments and passwords, and I could play a game or two (iRogue, anyone?) while waiting for my plane to arrive. Then I fell for a combined Pocket PC + GPS combination, which moved me over to the dark side. I used it for navigation alright, but quickly entering a contact or an appointment was too cumbersome to my taste. After a little over a year with it I decided to ditch it and put it online for sale.
So last week I got my brand new palmOne Tungsten E2. As easy to use as my little Zire, which I’ve still got, and with Bluetooth, so it wil talk to my Macs and to a (yet to buy) wireless GPS unit. Life is good.
i own the treo 650. unbeliveable how great this device has become. unlike the blackberry the phone is great and it doesnt take the thumb of an olympian to look up a phone number. unlimited data and internet access for $15 a month. the guys with blackberry’s at the office are envious.
My Cell is not a PDA but it has all the interesting things you can get in one of those (agenda, calendar, calculator, camera…). Is just my v525 Motorola, cleanly ereased it’s internal o.s. and just set up the software from v600, now is an v600 cell.
I think this phone is using some kind of linux based software, as it’s filesystem seems to be unix-like ;P
I can’t see how users can use their hybrid phone PDA functionality for long term as they will change their phones very soon and found it difficult to transfer data to their new phone.
I have a palmpilot with 1MB for 8 years. It never crashes. No one will steal it as it is worth nothing for re-sale. But I simply can’t live without it.
although I am a computer geek I was never interested in gadgets like a pda… don’t really know why
I’m using an HP5450 and love it, allthough for all the wrong reasons. I primarly use it as OGG-player and eBook reader, it also runs a nice gameboy emulator for the times my head isn’t in reading mode.
The only built-in function I use a lot is the notetaker. In my job I have to jot down lots of tiny bits of information. (ip adresses, passwords, serial numbers) I used to do this in small notebooks or (worse) post-it papers. Being able to write and draw on the screen is great.
It also happens to be Outlook compatible (that’s why my boss bought it in the first place), but reading lots of mail on a PDA sucks, answering mail sucks even harder.
The agenda is nice, but not very usefull. The battery life is to short to rely on, and the sucker turns itself on to alert me of upcomming events, and won’t turn itself of afterwards. Forgetting an appointment thus results in my battery getting drained, so the device is useless until I get to recharge it.
(there is an option to shut it down after a time-out, but that doens’t work when sound is playing, so I would have to kill my mp3 player everytime I turn it off).
Oh, and battery life sucks for the intensive use I make of it. It can run for about 3 hours before shutdown down.
I looked at PDA/phone combos and the specs-to-price ratio just didn’t make sense. So I bought a phone and PDA seperately. Got two devices instead of one, got better specs, and saved a bunch of money. Thing is, I use the phone occationally for work and rarely use the PDA at all. Should’ve just saved my $$.
-Bob