12 Things You Can Do With a PDA That You Can't Do With Any Other Computer
PHOTO ALBUM. Maybe you have had
that experience where you want to show someone a picture of your children, and
you take out your wallet, and the handoff is muffed and your pictures and
credit cards fall on the ground? You can carry a photo album in your PDA. If
you have several pictures, people can scroll through them. I use
Fireviewer
but some people prefer
Albums To Go. I have different categories – family,
ancestors, and genealogy friends. Can I add that the screens with the colors
are very good at this?
COMPASS. You can attach a GPS
receiver to your PDA and use it as a compass. I use NavComp for this. It will
tell you how far you’ve walked and how fast, too. Yes, I take it hiking, with
the Big Clock program going, too.
TRAVEL LOG. Using that same GPS,
you can plot your walks through ancestral homesites or gravesites on a map.
You can create with software from
Delorme or
Rand McNally.
NEWSPAPER. I never know when my
schedule will blow up, and I’ll find myself needing to cool my heels for 30
minutes or an hour waiting for a meeting. I used to carry a book or magazine
so I could pass the time with it. Now I carry my PDA. I subscribe to free
content at AvantGo.com, and whenever I sync my PDA, I get the current
information from sources such as the NY Times, the Economist, Variety, local
movie times, and movie reviews. You can even sync to some web pages, and you can carry
that news.
BOOK. AvantGo isn’t the only
source of content for the PDA. The variety and availability of eBooks is
growing, and many of them are free. Read it in the bus station so you won’t
have to pay attention to the guy by the pinball machine. Try
eBookMall.
ALARM. Sometimes I feel cut off
from my kids, away at college. So I program their class schedules into my
calendar, and it beeps to tell me when they change classes. I often use those
beeps to get out of conversations at the water cooler – “Oh, there goes the
alarm! Got to fix that subroutine at the nuclear power plant!” Most of the
time I just look at it and feel more connected. Some people need reminders to
take medicine, do chores, and the like. A PDA is an organizer first and
foremost.
GAMES. I haven’t covered games
because I honestly don’t have time to play them. There are PDA users to use
theirs for nothing but playing Missile Command and Dopewars. My focus is
family history, and when I find a game that promotes that, I’ll write about it
in glowing detail.
SHOPPING LIST. I use the Handy
Shopper feature when I go to the grocery store, in lieu of the old paper list.
I’ve been to the same store enough that I have the aisle numbers and items
entered. I sort it by aisle number and go up and down checking them off. A
piece of paper would probably work just as well, but if you’re a real geek
there is no choice in the matter.
CHECKLIST. The To-Do list is
terrific. If someone mentions a song, movie, or book that they like, I can
make a note to check it out later. I look at it a few days later and am
reminded.
OUTLINE. I have found that the
PDA is every bit as good as a sheet of paper for remembering those points you
want to bring up in a meeting. I often put my outline into the PDA, and speak
from the outline. I prepare those things well in advance, and in the last 20
minutes before the talk, I get and forget several great ideas for things to
say. With the PDA, I can scratch a few notes at the appropriate place in the
outline, and people think I have a good memory or something. A megabyte is a
very big tablet.
MP3 PLAYER. If you’re downloading
MP3 files of your favorite songs to one of the newer PDA’s (my old Vx won’t do
it), you can get an inexpensive ($15) gizmo that is shaped like a cassette
tape, with a wire to plug into your PDA’s headphone jack. Pop the converter
into your car’s cassette player, and you can play your favorite songs in the
car without going to the expense of buying a car CD player that reads MP3’s,
or taking the time to burn audio CD’s before you leave for work.
EMAIL. I
mentioned that I have a wireless modem. You have to buy
wireless service, it
doesn’t come with the PDA. I can get email in many cities, and send it. I can
also browse some web pages, even though it’s slow.
