PDA superguide

• Article 8 of 53
• iCreate, August 2004
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 2.7MB

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In the “Year of the Laptop” (© S. Jobs), why would you need anything other than an iBook or PowerBook to be wired wherever you go? It’s a good question, but ever since Apple released its first portable machine – which many professional powerlifters still use today as an alternative to weights – it’s been clear that laptops simply make it easier, not easy, to take files and programs with you wherever you go.

Fortunately, there is an alternative: the Personal Digital Assistant (or PDA). Roughly the size of the palm of your hand, a PDA has a screen, memory and the ability to synchronise data with a computer. Even though it’s nowhere near as powerful as a laptop, it can give you access to almost all your information – in particular, your calendar and your address book – without giving you a hernia; there’s no start-up time to worry about; you can access any of your applications in a couple of seconds; you can fit it into your pocket and carry it with you wherever you go; you can take it out from your pocket without anyone noticing you have an expensive, nickable electronic device with you; and if you drop it, your chances of a heart attack are substantially reduced relative to the inevitable sharp stabbing pains in the chest you’ll get when a PowerBook topples to its doom.

Unfortunately, if you do begin the journey down the path to true PDA enlightment, you’re going to have to get used to the phrase, “Does it work with a Mac?” along the way. And if you pick the wrong model, you’re going to be as cool as Bill Gates in a woollen sweater at a roller disco. So tread wisely and read on.

As always, your first question should be: “Do I really need this? What am I going to use it for?” If all you want to do is take your calendars and contacts with you and you can afford it, buy an iPod. They’re cool, can play lots of music and can store all your information and a little bit more using iSync or some third-party software.

If you want to be able to alter or add to that information, however, you’re going to have to look for something more. The next step up from the iPod is a “smartphone”. This is the same as a regular phone but with some computer-like programs – usually email, a calendar, a browser, and an image viewer. Importantly, you can make changes to calendars and contacts on your phone and they’ll be updated on your Mac the next time you synchronise them. Best of all, you can download and install additional programs from a PC or Mac, including some trusty Mac favourites such as Opera, RealPlayer and Acrobat Reader.

A smartphone may be enough for you and is a good alternative to a PDA. Even if you have a PDA as well, you might not want to take two devices with you all the time and having some of your data with you is better than none. Nevertheless, they do have quite a few failings. Since they’re smaller than PDAs, they have smaller screens so it’s harder to read things on a smartphone than it is with a PDA. Most have few keys to enter data with, so if you think writing text messages on a phone is hard enough, wait until you’ve tried composing an email on one.

The final area where smartphones fall down compared with PDAs is in software and synchronisation. Since smartphones have only recently appeared on the market, there are relatively few people with each variety of phone. As there are even fewer people willing to pay for new software for phones, there aren’t many programs out there. Many types of application would be unusable on the average smartphone anyway (anyone want to edit a spreadsheet on a 160-pixel wide screen?).

More important is the issue of synchronisation. While smartphones will happily synchronise contact and calendar information with Address Book and iCal, very few of them will synchronise that information with Entourage or Now Contact, for example. Other information won’t be synchronised at all. So, if you do upload a Word document onto your smartphone, by some miracle find a piece of software to open it and then don’t go blind from actually trying to read it, you’ll still have to manually upload it onto your Mac again and then synchronise any changes you’ve made with the original document (if that’s even possible).

It’s the amount of software and the ability to synchronise information that really makes a PDA a worthwhile purchase. PDAs have access to thousands of programs written especially for them, including games, business applications, databases, spreadsheets, word processors, dictionaries, shopping list programs, fitness trainers, language tutors, web browsers, wine advisors (!), guidebooks, maps, route planners and restaurant guides. Many can exchange information with Mac programs automatically during synchronisation and, when they don’t have Internet connections of their own, use your Mac’s to download data.

If you decide on a PDA rather than one of its less powerful cousins, it’s time to pick an operating system. While generally Macs use Mac OS X and PCs use Windows, PDAs divide into those that run the Palm OS and those that use the Pocket PC OS.

PDAs that use the Palm OS are the more obvious choice for most Mac users since they all come with software for Mac synchronisation, with the notable exception of Sony’s Clié devices. Pocket PCs don’t, although you can buy extra software for Mac syncing. There are also no really cheap Pocket PCs, with HP’s iPaq Pocket PC H1930 probably the cheapest at £189, and most are heavier and bulkier than their Palm brethren.

So is there any reason for a Mac user to buy a Pocket PC? The simple answer for most consumers is, “No, not really”. But for business users and power geeks, Pocket PCs may be more appealing, even if Mac support is limited. The Pocket PC OS is really a cut-down version of Windows, so developers find it a lot easier to rewrite a Windows program slightly for Pocket PCs than to completely rewrite it for Palm OS. As a result, there are many business-level applications being developed for Pocket PCs that are not making it through to the Palm OS.

For the power geek, the hardware in a Pocket PC also appeals more than Palm OS hardware. Not only do Pocket PCs tend to have more memory, faster processors and bigger screens, they are also more feature-laden and more expandable. For instance, many Palm devices have Bluetooth; the top end Tungsten C has WiFi (what we Mac users call AirPort); but no Palm OS device has both.

It is possible to add additional functions to PDAs, but that’s often not enough with Palm OS PDAs. Many have a slot for secure digital (SD) cards, which can add Bluetooth, WiFi, memory, GPS tracking, digital cameras, back-up functions and so on. But there is often poor software support. The Bluetooth card only works with Palm OS 4, not the currently shipping OS 5, so if you do splash out on the WiFi-equipped Tungsten C, you won’t be able to add Bluetooth capabilities to it. On the other hand, if you decide to buy a Tungsten T3 (£289) or Zire 72 (£219), which have integrated Bluetooth, hoping you’d be able to add WiFi later, you’d be sorely disappointed: the software only works with the Zire 71, which is being phased out and doesn’t have Bluetooth.

However, even if there are features not available on your preferred model, there are often ways to overcome this problem. While you could buy a top-end Treo 600 PDA (£525 by itself, so try to get it on contract through Orange or one of the other networks) so that you have a GPRS connection for wireless email, web surfing, etc built in, why not get a free Bluetooth smartphone on a contract and buy a cheaper Bluetooth-enabled PDA? Not only will you then be able to get a PDA with more features than the Treo, you’ll be able to use your phone’s GPRS connection to access the Internet. So look around for combinations of devices as well as SD cards that might give you the capabilities you need, rather than holding out for an all-in-one model.

Also, be sure you need those features anyway. Do you really need both Bluetooth and WiFi? It might be nice to have Internet access wherever you go using Bluetooth and a phone, but you’re not going to get a GPRS connection when you’re abroad unless you know the local network provider’s settings. But with WiFi hotspots everywhere now, you should be able to access the Internet anywhere and at faster speeds using a WiFi-only PDA.

So before you decide whether to buy a Palm OS PDA or a Pocket PC, decide which features you’re going to need: Mac syncing or high-end PDA capabilities. Even with third-party software, the most a Pocket PC or Clié will be able to do with your Mac is synchronise with iCal, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail or Entourage, read Word and Excel files and share its Internet connection. But you will get access to more business applications, both WiFi and Bluetooth at the same time and a greater range of expansion cards if that’s what you want.

By contrast, while you may not get all the things you want with a Palm OS PDA, its Mac synchronisation is leagues better. For one thing, all the Palm OS devices except the Clié include free personal organiser software based on Apple’s own Claris Organizer, which many still regard as the best personal information manager developed for the Mac. The Mac synchronisation software, HotSync Manager, will upload and download files to and from your PDA, including music, photos, voice memos and other files. But best of all, HotSync Manager supports plug-ins known as “conduits”.

Conduits enable HotSync Manager to synchronise other kinds of Mac data with programs on your PDA. Some of these are free, including Apple’s own conduit for iCal and Address Book. Others come with programs you can buy for the Mac: Office, Now Contact and Up-to-date, Chronos Organizer, Web Confidential and others all have their own conduits. Yet more support programs that you can buy for your PDA: WorldMate (which downloads currency conversion rates and weather forecasts for travellers), Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide (the conduit downloads movie and DVD release dates to your PDA), Vindigo (which gives you maps; up-to-date movie times; and guides to shops, museums, restaurants, clubs, bars and even toilets for select cities) and AvantGo (which allows you to read web pages on the move, even if you don’t have an Internet connection) all have Mac conduits. You can even get a conduit for downloading Radio Times listings from the Internet to your PDA: the Radio Times application on your handheld can control your TV and satellite box using infra-red signals, too – try doing that with a PowerBook!

Synchronisation between handheld and Mac needn’t stop with just one computer. You can use the synchronisation software to unify data on Macs using a PDA. To sync the data on both Macs, simply connect the PDA to them in turn and run the syncing software a few times. Since PDAs all come with software that works with Windows, you can, in theory, also synchronise data between Windows and Mac.

Be careful however. Before you do anything, make backups. As anyone who’s used iSync can testify, syncing isn’t as easy as it looks and you can quite often end up with duplicate or deleted contacts. Take a look at the fields available in different pieces of address book software and you’ll notice that the information you can store about people in Entourage is quite different from what you can store in Outlook for Windows and so on. The same is true for the PDA as well. So the developers of synchronisation conduits have to make a choice: don’t synchronise all the information, or bung anything left over in custom and notes fields. This isn’t much of a problem when you’re only syncing one machine with a PDA or you stick to the same software on all your machines. But as soon as you start mixing software, you’re going to end up cross-pollinating your immaculate records in Address Book with useless cruft from other programs (Now Contact is particularly guilty of inserting “height of contact’s third child when he was seven” and other pointless make-the-sale! data into Notes fields). Be prepared for an initial period of checking and de-duplication when you start mixing software on different machines and keep a watchful eye on what happens in subsequent syncs. But with caution, you should be able to get a compromise data format that works on all machines and all software.

Once you’ve picked Pocket PC or Palm OS, look at both current and discontinued models to see which ones have the features you need and the aesthetic you want (some look less than cool, but you may be willing to grin and bear the mockery of your friends and random strangers). When PDAs are upgraded, there’s not usually much added beyond extra memory or slightly faster processors, so older models may well meet your needs just as well. Older models of PDAs also linger with resellers for far longer than older Macs and PCs. The Treo 90, for example, remains the smallest and lightest Palm PDA yet made; it is the only one available for under £300 that uses a keyboard rather than handwriting recognition for input; it can use a Bluetooth SD card to connect to mobile phones; and it was discontinued a year ago. Yet you can still buy it on Amazon for £137. So take a look at online stores to see if some of the now-discontinued models are still available and have the features you want, but at a cheaper price.

Be sure, however, to pay very careful attention to the features you’d be losing by going for a cheaper or discontinued model. A model with a Motorola chip will be too slow to play music or videos, for instance.

The planning over, you’re now free to go out and buy a PDA. Once people start using PDAs, they often wonder how they lived without them. The more you learn about them, the more you can get out of them, as you add software and make them suit your lifestyle and work. For a relatively small outlay, you can have an A-Z, a portable computer, your diary, your photo album, a travel guide, a TV listings magazine, a remote control and a music player all in one pocket. Now that’s magic, isn’t it?

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