Palmtops for Luddites
PDA equals Pencil, Diary, Address book
13 April, 2006 by IT Reviews Staff
Of these, by far the most elusive requirement is the reflective screen. With a conventional, back-lit PDA screen, the only way to see what you're writing in broad daylight is to squint and shade the display with your hand. Not ideal when you're trying knock out a few thousand words of The Next Great British Novel while sitting at a beach-side café in Brighton.
The closest I've come to achieving my goal is with the Psion 5mx that I've been using for the past few years. It seems I'm not alone in this, as these beautifully-designed machines still fetch around £100 on eBay. But for my purposes they're now getting rather long in the tooth (no Wi-Fi, for example, and the e-mail clients are a bit ropey). I've considered all sorts of alternatives, from a Nokia Communicator with built-in keyboard to a smaller PDA with a separate Bluetooth keyboard. None of them seems to fit the bill.
Then I took a more sideways look at the problem, reasoning that in PDAs as in life, what I want isn't necessarily what I need. Time to consider the latter rather than the former.
I have dozens of applications on the Psion 5mx, ranging from a Europe-wide route-planner to a Sinclair Spectrum emulator, from a Perl interpreter to an astronomy package. It occurred to me that I don't really use any of them except for the word processor, the address book, the e-mail client, the diary and (very occasionally) the Web browser. So that's my requirements reduced at a stroke.
Of those, the e-mail client and the Web browser are only used when I go away for more than a week. Anything less than that and I can live without checking e-mail. If you're a Crackberry addict you'll find that hard to understand, but in general I find that e-mail creates unnecessary extra work, and I have no desire to be "in the loop" while I'm at the airport.
So, what are we left with for everyday use? A diary, an address book and a word processor. After a thorough purge, I exported 120 or so important contacts from the Psion's address book to a CSV spreadsheet. Importing this into Excel and making a few tweaks to font sizes and layout allowed me to print the whole lot out onto two sides of an A4 sheet of paper. Easy to carry, easy to replace, easy to update.
Next, the diary. I'm planning to revert to a paper one soon, but for now it has to be PC-based, as I have a lot of recurring items that slip out of my mind each month unless an alarm goes off to remind me about them. But I found plenty of free calendar software on the Web that did the job for me. Obviously if you're an Outlook fan then you already have what you need. Either way, job done. Add a large paper wall calendar for the more important events (i.e. non-work ones) and that's that box firmly ticked.
Finally, the word processor. I had to break this requirement down into two components. First there are the notes I make when I go away for a few days; thoughts, ideas, jottings, letters to her indoors, etc. For these I now have... a paper notepad. It cost me 49p, is perfectly legible in broad daylight (apart from my appalling handwriting) and never runs out of battery power.
For the Great British Novel, I've bought something rather more quirky. Costing me £30 on eBay, I now have an old Apple eMate, running the Newton Operating System. Looking like a child's toy or educational computer, it's basically a word processor with a built-in keyboard that's almost full-size, a large LCD monochrome screen that can be read even in direct sunlight, a rugged plastic casing and a 30-hour battery life.
I'm writing this editorial on it now, and it's absolutely ideal. A fantastic piece of hardware that cost about £500 when new, but was canned by Apple after little more than a year, is now doing sterling service for me.
I still have to sort out something for when I'm away for more than a week, of course. I may dust off the Psion 5mx for those occasions, but increasingly I suspect I'll be relying on the proliferation of internet cafés that seem to appear wherever I go. I might take a copy of Puppy Linux with me on a USB stick, just for security and privacy.
And that's that. I no longer use a PDA on a daily basis. It's been six weeks so far and I don't miss it at all. That's all the more impressive when you consider that I've owned PDAs continuously since 1994. It's a relief not having to worry about batteries, backups, theft, synchronisation issues, file format conversions, software updates, lost styluses and broken screen cables.
I know this solution won't suit everyone, but for many stressed executives it's worth a try. As far as work-life balance is concerned, it's a big step in the right direction.
