My PDAs over the years
It is interesting to see how the personal organiser has morphed into the PDA which then morphed into a media device and now into a phone. Over the years I’ve lusted after and I’ve owned a number of PDA devices ranging from the sleek Palm Vx to the basic Palm Zire and now I’ve finally caught up a bit with the trend and have a mobile phone / PDA hybrid device: a Blackberry. I can remember being fascinated by devices like the Psion 3, Psion 5 and Psion Revo series of PDAs which all featured a miniature computer style form factor with monochrome screens and keyboards. Then PDAs embraced touch screens with devices like the original Palm Pilot, Apple Newton and various Microsoft offerings.
The first PDA I owned was the super slick Palm Vx pictured on the left, it had 8mb of memory, a gorgeous aluminum body and the latest PalmOS. I can remember working through various add-ons for this PDA over the years including USB syncing, OS upgrades and various carrying cases. This device really cemented my love of Palm devices as they always performed their main function brilliantly: keeping you organised. Other devices could connect to the internet, play music or videos but nothing I tried came close to the Palm organiser software or its PC counterpart: Palm Desktop. From the get go Palm organisers could also sync with Microsoft Outlook but Outlook and Palm did not share the same organisation model so syncing could be a bit hit or miss.
I eventually sold my beloved Palm Vx in favor of upgrading to an HP Jordana 710 as I was seduced by its keyboard, storage options and the potential of a Wireless network card for mobile browsing. However on taking delivery of the unit and some initial experimentation I sent it back for a refund as several things including the lack of a screen catch made it not a particularly well thought out piece of hardware. Unfortunately as I’d already sold my Palm Vx to afford the Jordana I was left without a PDA for a while until Palm released the original super cheap Palm Zire which for a bargain 50 GBP I could not resist and it let me pick up the latest version of my favorite mobile operating system.
One of the best things about the Zire series was that they charged and synced by USB by default unlike the Palm Vx which was a serial device which you could upgrade to use USB, although it never worked great over USB in my experience. I eventually outgrew the mere 2mb of memory the original Zire came with so upgraded to its bigger brother the Zire 21 with a whole 8mb of memory. This device lasted for a long time until I started to outgrow it too and started looking around for something with more memory and a faster CPU than the Zire 21.
My next upgrade was to the new Palm Z22 which was the successor for the Zire 31 but they shortened the Zire title down to Z. This model featured a faster processor, colour screen and 32mb of memory which for a Palm at the time was huge. My only real gripe with this model and indeed the whole Zire series was the move away from the four application buttons that the original palms had: calender, contacts, tasks and memos to just two application buttons: calender and contacts (which I always changed to tasks). One of the best new features on the Z22 was the new Agenda view in the calender application that showed both your next couple of appointments and the tasks at the top of your task list.
And now I have another new PDA device that is not a Palm for the first time in years. I’ve just recieved a Blackberry 8700v from a family member in the UK who just got a newer model. My main desire for getting a Blackberry was to combine my mobile phone and PDA into one device. I had been looking at getting a Palm smartphone but then the offer of a free Blackberry came up. I’m looking forward to getting to grips with a Blackberry after hearing so much about them. As I’ve never really used a mobile phone for web browsing or email due to text input being so painful, I’ll be interested to see how it is on a device like a Blackberry with a miniature QWERTY keyboard. I’m also interested to see if the Blackberry works better syncing against Outlook than a Palm device typically does.
