Digital Upgrade

The moment is right for owners of those dinky digital diaries — like the ones manufactured by Casio — to move on and acquire real PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants. Over the last decade or so, I’ve made my way through a number of these devices: simple phone books from Casio; others, like the Sharp Wizard, had provisions to access entire encyclopaedias; the Velo, more like a pocket PC, from Phillips not only managed to create and store Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, but it also let you connect to the net, browse and manage email; the iPAQ which did likewise, but was half the size and weight; and the Palm Pilot, which, in the classic sense, is the original PDA. But the PDA to go for is the Trio 180 from Handspring which combines a phone with an organizer, SMS text messaging, the wireless web, and a QWERTY keyboard with a graffiti writing area in one stylish package.

Of course, the Velo let you scratch out instant notes in your handwriting and the Palm has programmes like Doodlebug and Bug Me that let you do the same, but the Trio is in a class of its own.

Palm, like the Mac, has a fanatical following. And Palm users will swear by Bug Me which lets you write notes and set up an alarm – so that the note pops up and acts as a reminder. Palm users will remind others of the fact that programmes like Palm Bar let you become an instant hit at a party and so on. However, it is devices like the Trio that will dominate the PDA market.

The Trio is a dual-band world phone that can maintain call history, dial straight out of your phone book and provide three-way calling. The convenient part is that you can copy all your Palm software on to the Trio (it runs on Palm OS) and feel completely at home the instant you begin to use it.

The Trio clearly leans towards communications, and is seen as a business tool. Those with an inclination for entertainment would prefer Sony’s Clie, with the ability to take digital pictures, play MP3 files and display video. Wonder who is going to be the first to add an FM receiver to the PDA?

(The author is Station Director, Radio City, 91 FM, Bangalore)