Personal Digital Adventure - Part 1

2003-09-17 18:02:58

In March 2003, I picked up a new Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to replace my late (and seriously lamented) Palm Vx that has served me so faithfully since 2000. I can no longer conceive of professional or personal life without a PDA nestled in hand, and being without one was like going Cold Turkey!

This makes it the perfect time to tell my readers how I got into the "PDA" habit.

Electronic Diaries

I was introduced to the concept of "Electronic Diaries" way back in the early 1990s, when I picked up a Casio Digital Diary to track the lengthening list of telephone numbers and other contact information that I was accumulating during my work and my speaking tours.

My purchase decision wasn't based on availability (Digital diaries had been around for quite a while), but connectivity - the unit I picked up had an option to copy data to and from our PCs. This was mission critical for me - diaries get lost or stolen, lose power or otherwise tend to become unavailable, and my data was (and continues to be) important to me.

Convenience

Using this diary was convenient, but backing it up was not. It used a slow serial connection, with cables that had proprietary connectors, and software that either wasn't available or simply wouldn't work. I finally managed to get a combination of things going (including a cable made for me by my friend Babu Kalakrishnan, software I downloaded from CompuServe, lots of R&D with port speeds and data formats), but it sure wasn't very intuitive.

But there was another factor that I didn't enjoy - these gadgets were really lifeless. Fixed function devices like digital diaries tend to be just that - no surprises, no change, nothing new. You have your basic telephone numbers/calculator/memos/world clock/appointment functions, and that was it.

Very easy to get bored with, and I did. While I continued to use my digital diary for several years, it clearly wasn't meant to be an integral part of my life.

Peter's Palm

One day, I was sitting with my friend Peter de Jong, when he whipped out his latest gadget acquisition - a US Robotics Palm Pilot, and proceeded to show me what it could do.

I was totally unimpressed. It was just another digital diary, albeit with a fancier interface.

What got my attention was when he showed me what came with it - a "cradle" that you plugged into your PC's serial port. You then placed the Palm Pilot into the cradle, hit the "Hotsync" button, and in a matter of moments, the PC and the Palm Pilot synchronized their data (address lists, phone numbers, appointments, etc. - ho hum!).

No twiddling, no fiddling - everything just worked.

The best part was - if the Palm Pilot now at any time lost its data (like when the non-rechargeable batteries inevitably died), you only needed to hotsync again, and all your data was back in place.

Magic! This was how things were supposed to work!

However, Peter still couldn't get me excited enough to take the plunge and buy one myself. This whole PDA business still looked like a fancy electronic diary to me. I liked to think that my life was more than a fixed function.

Then Peter installed a small program on the Palm Pilot. And probably changed my life.

For good.

Suddenly, this PDA business took on a whole new perspective for me. This wasn't a fixed function device - it could be expanded, extended, made more useful, more entertaining, more me.

Getting PDA'd

Over the next few months, I spent a considerable amount of time researching this whole palm Pilot business. By then, 3COM had taken over the manufacture of the Palm Pilot with its acquisition of US Robotics, and had now re-branded the unit, and started focusing on both the connectivity as well as the expandability.

Literally thousands of extremely useful little programs started appearing on bulletin boards, on the Internet, on CompuServe and elsewhere, and there was even an emulator program available for your PC that allowed you to run a simulated Palm Pilot on your PC desktop, so you could try out various things without spending big moolah.

One obstacle that stood between my own PDA and me was of course that I lived in India, where such things simply weren't available. However, that's what friends are for, and on one home-trip abroad, Peter purchased and carried in my very own Palm III.

I was enthralled.

My First PDA

My first PDA (the Palm III) was a basic 2 MB RAM unit, with a 160x160 monochrome display. Still no rechargeable batteries (and I proceeded to spend a fortune over the next year and a half on batteries!), but it was a real PDA, and for the first time I had something other than my clunky notebook to work with while traveling, sitting at my desk or simply lying flat in bed.

The very first thing that I got myself was games. There was no shortage of them on the Internet, and while they weren't exactly Nintendo quality (lack of colour does tend to be a downer there), they could keep me engrossed long periods of time. And if I ever got bored well, I simply installed another game.

It wasn't that I could just do one thing at a time on the PDA, either. Like a little PC, I could store multiple programs on the unit, and call up any at will and use it.

Another extremely useful function was documents. With the addition of a simple, standard text reader program, I could install entire books on the PDA, which I could read or refer to whenever I wanted to. For a maniac reader like me (I read anything including the publisher information at the end of the newspaper, or the manufacturer info on a box of thumbtacks) this was sheer heaven. No more carrying around fat books one visit to the Project Gutenberg site would get me enough free (and totally legal) reading matter for weeks together. And I could also capture entire web-pages and store them on the PDA for later reference.

By now, the old Casio Digital Diary had been relegated to the junkyard after one final backup session.

The PDA had truly taken over my world.

By the end of the 1990s, I was effectively helpless without my trusty PDA I would not leave home without my spectacles, cellular phone or Palm III. Nothing else mattered. Period.

Growing Pains

But things were getting tight. Memory capacity of the Palm III was limited to 2 MB, and even though some unbelievable hacks allowed me to actually extend the memory by another MB (by storing some programs in the units unused Flash ROM), I found myself running out of space more often than I liked. Also, the ever-present battery problems were quite irking.

I needed something new, but couldn't really bring myself to commit to another purchase.

Then two things happened in quick succession that changed that perspective.
The first was my discovery of a service called Avantgo that allowed me to subscribe to entire PDA-formatted websites (news, entertainment, etc.) and download all of them in one go. In a matter of minutes, I would have the latest news from CNN, BBC, News.com, Slashdot and other sites on my Palm, ready for offline-reading whenever I had the time.

But Avantgo stuff needed space (megabytes) - space that the Palm III didn't have.

The second thing was that a set of batteries leaked, wrecking the insides of the Palm III.

A client of mine was traveling abroad when the latter event happened, and I immediately fired of an email, asking her to pick up a new Palm Vx at Singapore airport something she thankfully managed to do.

A few days, later, I had before me my brand new Palm Vx - sleek, slim, rechargeable battery that charged automatically every time I placed the unit in the cradle to hotsync, great screen (though still monochrome, but much clearer), much faster and snappier performance and most important of all
EIGHT MB of memory (plus another 700 odd KB in Flash ROM).

Aaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

(Continued in Part 2)

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