Personal Digital Adventure - Part 2

2003-09-18 19:22:21

Now that I had room to grow, I did.

First of all, I subscribed to about almost 2 MB of channels from Avantgo. The service itself was just growing, and every day new stuff could be found, so you can imagine that there quite a few changes in my lineup over the next few months as I settled on what I could call my steady set of channels. These included BBC News, Reuters News, Slashdot.org, PalmInfoCenter.com, CNET News.com, Beyond 2000, and quite a few entertainment and technology channels.

Several times a day, whenever I had a few minutes, I would place my PDA in its cradle, and hotsync, automatically backing up any new data that I had acquired since the last sync, and downloading the latest news updates via Avantgo.

By now, PDAs were becoming quite common all around Microsoft's WinCE (PocketPC) based PDAs had also started making their appearance, but the cost factor continued to keep PDAs out of most peoples hands.

Therefore it was quite common to see a lot of people craning over their seats on flights to have a look what I was doing there with that little thing in my hand. I often found myself explaining to both passengers and crew what the PDA could do, and would show them captured websites, news, books, games, information, etc.

Input!

One thing that I found very amusing was the fascination people held for the way I input data into the PDA.

The Palm PDAs use a pseudo-handwriting method called Graffiti that allowed me to quickly write characters on the a specially marked area of the PDA, which would be recognised by the PDA and stored as the correct alphabets, signs and numbers. This comes completely natural to me, and I had grown quite adept at it, being able to write entire articles and reports quickly and neatly that way. But for some reason, this completely natural way of writing was for most people something alien!

In 2001, I acquired a foldable keyboard for the Palm Vx that was literally no bigger than the PDA itself when in folded state, but expanded into a full-size keyboard when unfolded, allowing me to type really fast. Strangely enough, most people didn't bat an eyelid when I did that in an airplane making me wonder what kind of cybernetic rules of engagement were at play here when it came to peoples perceptions of what is normal. ;-)

Communication

In the early years of using a PDA, I used to carry a small pocket modem with me that would allow me to connect my PDA to the Internet to pick up new stuff. However over the years, I found that the need for this grew less and less.
The increased capacity of the PDA is was using allowed me to connect less frequently and pick up more material than I could run out of on flights and sometimes even entire trips. The capture-and-read-offline way of dealing with information was a runaway success for me, and allowed me access to more non-transient information than I could have asked for.

Did that mean that actual "always-on" online connectivity was something I could do without? Not really. But wireless networking was just maturing, Indian service providers were just beginning to look at data services such as GPRS (and botching up the concept really badly), so I was in no real hurry to "get online" via my cell phone (though that was always possible) or WiFi. There was a time for all that, but it hadn't yet come.

This was fairly ironic. I am a networking and data communication consultant, and here I was actually thriving off non-connectivity! ;-)

Dilemma

In early 2003, my faithful Palm Vx started flaking out. I frequently had complete hard resets, losing all data, and the unit's battery started misbehaving. It was definitely time for a new PDA.

The question was - which?

To understand my dilemma, one needs to look at the PDA scene at that time.

(Continued in Part 3)

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