Working with PDAs

Does anyone have experience with PDAs and the day to day business tasks? There seems to be so many feature to choose from depending on your budget.

And the monthly costs really add up fast with each additional feature added. Is it really worth paying $90 a month for the whole works?

PDA. like a iPAQ, etc.? Or like Blackberries and Sidekicks, etc.

Any of them, how to they meld with business process, at what cost?

I have used iPAQ's, etc - I don't any more. Just not "real" enough. In the end, it ended up a glorified calculator.

Our Exec here have crackberries, but I simply don't need one - there is no such thing as a marketing emergency here - so between my always-on email & cell phone, I'm handy.

I thought of a Blackberry personally, but after looking at the costs, it was about $80 a month Canadian to have e-mail on my hip - simply not worth it to me.

Now, a tablet PC is something I *may* consider - smaller than a laptop, just as powerful, sometimes more so, and vastly more practically useful than a PDA.

In the end, it ended up a glorified calculator.....there is no such thing as a marketing emergency here - so between my always-on email & cell phone, I'm handy.

hahaha...I'd have to agree with SportsGuy

IMHO, top level executives don't really have real functional need for PDAs (other than going with the trend of owning one that's thin/shiny and comes with interesting-but-mostly-useless features/functions)...they don't even have all that many meetings :P

when I am at work, I don't need a PDA for meeting schedules and what not (my puter pops annoying meeting reminders even if I don't want to know about them lol)

I think PDAs are useful for field sales peeps and consultants...but they usually have laptops with them...so.../shrug

Having shinny gadgets that do all sorta 'things' do make the people, at least, 'seem' really important...a lot of people would pay money for this 'image' alone.

I will admit, though, that I'd kinda like to dump my current cell phone for the new Motorola SLVR...

I don't know.. I'm not using my PDA right now but I've found that they're pretty easy to get attached to. Having a schedule and all my names and numbers in a tiny little package is very convenient. I also occasionally use mine as an MP3 player or to play games on. It depends alot on whether you're a traditional 'pen & paper' kind of person or not too. If you like having an appointment type book where you keep your stuff - sometimes entering text into these things can be a bit of a learning curve. I would agree though that if you're carrying a laptop with you everywhere, you probably don't need a PDA. Its one of the reasons I don't use my PDA as much since all of the contact info & appointment stuff goes onto a laptop just as well. For personal reasons I avoid stuff like blackberries like the plague - there are limits as to how 'reachable' I want to be. I know if I was to get a blackberry and it started ringing at 2am I'd probably answer it. My brother has this problem - he was given a blackberry from work to use - now they pretty much think since he has it, they can contact him anytime, anyplace, anywhere which can be very frustrating for him.

A 3G phone running Symbian is quite swish... Internet at 384KB, good organiser, diary, etc, ability to read email and Word, Access, Excel docs, a large capacity MMC card to back up all the data, bluetooth, and a few other gizmos too...

now they pretty much think since he has it, they can contact him anytime, anyplace, anywhere which can be very frustrating for him.

My battery would 'die' more often than industry standard...but that could just be my battery :P

For all the uses that Sinoed mentioned which except for playing MP3s are what I personally own a PDA for there is no need to pay a monthly fee of any kind.

All you need is something like my choice which happens to be a used Handspring Visor Prism. You can pick one up for $60-$70 on eBay.

I use an expensive wonderful program called Time and Chaos that syncs to the Visor via a USB attached cradle. It is far easier to type contact information into my PC and then dump it into the Visor than to enter it on the PDA itself.

I can easily and within minutes send a copy of all my contact information and the passwords I store in another great program called Roboform from my PC to the PDA. I can also transfer new data from the PDA to the PC.

I had instant messaging devices before just about anyone else (1984 IBM) and perhaps if I still worked in the field I would want something more than this Visor. I have a cell phone so for now the Visor is fine.

I chose that model because it has an easier to read (indoors) color display. If there is something easy to read in sunlight I haven't seen it yet (not that I've looked lately).