When two mobile devices are better than one

Michael C. Barnes

Last year I wrote a couple of articles about using a PDA instead of a laptop for travel. A laptop is best to move from desk to desk but not ideal for use in locations in-between. Laptops also take a long time to boot up, while the longest battery life for a laptop is about three hours.

A laptop is bulky and generally requires all the parts and pieces to be lugged around in a travel bag. A PDA, on the other hand, can fit into a pocket, boots up quickly and will generally work for from four to six hours per charge.

I have used ultra portable devices for many years - I bought one of the first pocketable computers, the Atari Portfolio. This computer was the first pocketable PC and it came with 128 KB RAM and had an integrated version of MS-DOS 2.11. Later, I bought the HP LX100, another pocketable MS-DOS based computer.

About eight years ago, unable to make up my mind between a Phillips Velo running Windows CE 1.0 or the original Palm Pilot, I bought both. However, I quickly chose to use the Palm Pilot, with its more efficient memory use and its much better battery life. Over the years, I have bought over a half dozen different Palm devices and two Pocket PC-based products.

I am a fan of both Palm and Pocket PC based systems. I believe that the Palm is easier to use, more efficient in its use of resources and more useful out of the box than Pocket PCs.

The two areas where the Palm based devices have fallen behind the Pocket PC are wireless support and VoIP. On the other hand, the Treo phones are better phones than most of the Pocket PC-based phones.

When I started using the HP Ipaq 6365 PDA phone, I was quite pleased with the features, which included built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I was not so pleased with the sluggish nature of the device or its tendency to lock up and have to be rebooted several times a day. What disappointed me the most was that the processor in the HP 6365 was not fast enough to work with Skype. I was able to use a variety of SIP phone clients, but Skype didn't work.

Another area where the HP Ipaq 6365 failed to live up to the expectations established by my previous Palm Tungsten 3 was in handling spreadsheets and word processing documents. Palm devices generally come with a light version of Documents to Go from Dataviz. This is better at handling documents from Microsoft Office than the Pocket Word and Excel that are included on most Pocket PCs. I have solved this problem by purchasing Textmaker and PlanMaker from the German company SoftMaker.

My wife has accused me of staging accidents when I want to upgrade technology. I bought the Palm T3 after dropping my Palm Zire 71 getting out of a bus. The PDA dropped to the ground and I watched as the rear wheels turned my PDA into scrap. Last week, I crashed my mountain bike. My helmet protected my head and my HP Ipaq 6365 protected my belt. As I checked myself to see if all my parts were still working, I came across my HP Ipaq 6365 and saw the screen was cracked. I explained that while we knew the screen was cracked, we didn't know what other damage had occured and it would certainly be a long time before I had a PDA. As the Ipaq 6365 was also my cell phone, I would need to replace it right away.

I went to Fortune IT Mall to send my PDA to be repaired and to look for my new PDA/mobile phone replacement. I considered the new HP with its faster processor but I found that the screen was too small for my eyes. I really liked the new BenQ PDA phone, but the store that I have used to buy PDAs for several years warned me that the BenQ PDA phone still had some issues.

After mulling over the many options that I had, I ultimately decided to go back to using a separate PDA and mobile phone. I decided to buy the Sony Ericsson T630 mobile phone because it was inexpensive and because it has both Bluetooth and GPRS. I decided to buy the HP Ipaq 4700 because it had the best screen I had ever seen on a PDA and it was also one of the fastest PDAs on the market.

The combination of the Ipaq 4700 and the T630 cost about the same as buying one of the better PDA phones. None of the PDA phones could match the HP Ipaq 4700 for display or performance.

The T630 proved to be quite capable on its own, and was able to sync with Outlook and stow all my contacts in the phone. I could even send and receive email. In fact, if all one needs is a way to keep a list of contacts, have basic email, synchronise their calendars with their PCs and have a few basic functions such as calculator and clock, then a simple phone like the T630 might be enough.

My main purpose for using a PDA is to minimise the times that I have to use a laptop. This means support for complex email, word processing, spreadsheet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Skype. To date, the Ipaq 4700 comes the closest to meeting these requirements.

This does not mean that the Ipaq 4700 is perfect. First of all, it is quite expensive at about 22,000 baht. The IR is located on the bottom of the PDA, making it either difficult to use or useless. It includes a touch pad that is at best, useless and sometimes, quite irritating.

For the time being, I am back to using a GPRS and Bluetooth enabled phone and a PDA. I am much happier with this arrangement than I was trying to cram the features of a phone and the features of a PDA into a single device. Who knows, maybe the next generation of PDA phones will lead to yet another accident.