My Life in PDAs

3 Replies

Ordered by date acquired, with :

  1. PalmPilot Professional – faulty, so I only had it for a few days
  2. Psion Series 5 – never found a real use for it. Plus it was expensive, and the rubber skin started peeling
  3. Palm V – slim, and beautifully made
  4. Casio EM-500 – starved of RAM, but such a gorgeous screen for its time
  5. Palm IIIxe – Cheap, rugged, lots of RAM
  6. HP Jornada 568 – liked the flip down screen protector
  7. Sony Ericsson P800 – weird but promising. Felt like an alpha product
  8. Handspring Treo 600 – lovely build and software integration. Pity about the voice quality
  9. i-mate JAM – great form factor, but unstable, and poor telephony
  10. Dell Axim X50v – great screen, super fast, dual memory cards. It’s just a little too large
  11. Nokia N95 – see my review

Eleven PDAs in 10 years, and still the search continues for my perfect device 🙂

3 thoughts on “My Life in PDAs”

  1. Stephen

    I’ve had a few of those myself (or perhaps different versions of some).

    I don’t think I want very much – a phone, email/web access via 3G and Wi-Fi, ability to read MS Office documents and PDFs, decent calendar app, music player and a camera (so much easier for getting diagrams in or copying text info from a magazine or book than stylus or keyboard). Decent battery life too of course, but this will get better as screens evolve through LED backlights to ePaper.

    The problem is that nobody has yet cracked the problem of coming up with a better interface than the QWERTY keyboard, and there is a minimum size below which a keyboard doesn’t really work.

    The iPhone UI innovations are welcome but from the reviews then even Apple haven’t solved this problem yet.

  3. Steven Post author

    Hi Sean,

    I was rather put off Windows Mobile phones due to the instability of my previous JAM. The new HTC Kaiser is very tempting, but I’m not sure I can justify buying another expensive phone at the moment. I’ll see what the reviews are like when the Kaiser is released to the public, but my gut feeling is that I’ll be sticking with the N95 till next year.

Leave a Reply