Devil's Advocate: My quest for the ideal PDA

Who doesn't want an easy-to-use, all-in-one PDA/phone? But with designs seemingly on the market to suit every taste is there one which suits Martin Brampton? Is there heck...

Last time, I was musing over the problem of finding the perfect combination of PDA and mobile phone. It is clear from my postbag that others have been contemplating the same problem. With a number of helpful suggestions, I can dig a bit deeper.

One reader shared my enthusiasm for the Nokia Communicator and was sticking with it, despite its bulk. Oddly, he had also suffered signs of failure but his Communicator recovered before he had gone too far down the replacement road. I hope it will continue working well for him, as it is an excellent blend of PDA and phone functionality, with fax and text messaging thrown in.

A couple of other devices are obviously popular with readers. One is the XDA, available in the UK on the O2 network. It is based on the Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition and seems to share virtues and vices with Pocket PC devices generally. Users mostly find the phone functions easy to use and the PDA functions naturally integrate very well with Microsoft desktop systems. It does achieve the ease of use that comes from full integration of the contact information held in the PDA and the communications functions of the phone.

Although there are some reservations, some of them are shared by other integrated devices. The GPRS is slow and heavy reliance on the XDA for email is made difficult by problems over the automatic checking for messages every so many minutes. Some users have reported problems with phone reception and find that coverage is patchy. It seems that a strong signal is needed for practical use and the handling of SMS is clumsy. Against these difficulties, most people report good battery life and most like the display.

A difficulty for me is that I am reluctant to be locked into a Microsoft world. In line with earlier remarks, there is a lot to be said for avoiding buying the market leader. If we are to have a competitive and innovative market, there must be other powerful contenders. Moreover, a strong showing by a non-Microsoft system in an important market like mobile phones will maintain pressure for vendor neutral standards to support synchronisation and data transfer. So, I rather like the idea of using a Symbian- or Palm-based PDA in order to put my principles into practice.

That brings us to the other reader recommendation, the Handspring Treo. By technology standards, it is quite an old device, and the hardware specification is correspondingly low. But the Palm OS has always achieved a lot with a little, leaving the Treo still quite a strong contender, even though it uses an older version of Palm OS. A major advantage of the simpler Palm approach is the small size and light weight of the Treo. It does look a good package, although for someone in the market now, there are newer phone oriented devices that take advantage of the latest technology and are aggressively priced.

The Sony Ericsson P800 looks tempting in many ways, with the latest Lithium-polymer batteries giving exceptionally long life. It is small and light and, although standard memory is limited, Symbian and its applications are much more conservative of memory than Pocket PC. Subject to the network, the GPRS is capable of being much faster than older devices and Bluetooth wireless capability is built in as standard. It also has an integrated camera, a feature I think will rapidly gain popularity.

Yet some reviewers have been lukewarm and my experience of poor support from Ericsson is a major deterrent for me. The difficulty of finding a good keyboard solution is also a problem for all these units. Ideally, I want a tiny, portable gadget that would still allow me to type an article like this. Neither handwriting recognition nor the minute keyboard of the Treo is really up to the job. So unless you have any more suggestions, I will have to go on looking and hoping.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.

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