PDAs make business and home life easier
When Jerry Stapleton sees serious business people still using a paper system, he has two thoughts: either they don’t have a lot of contacts and appointments to keep track of, or they’re technophobes.
"And," Stapleton says, "they seem to have all of these prepared responses as to why they’re keeping their paper system. They go to some length to defend their paper systems.
"I think this is a defining moment in technology," he adds, "because there’s just no excuse for not having a Palm if you’re at all serious about keeping track of your calendar, etc."
"Paper users" are frequently heard wondering what would happen if a PalmPilot or other personal digital assistant (PDA) device was lost or stolen. Or, better yet they pose, what if the batteries wear out or it crashes?
No problem, PDA users say, because the contents of the PDA are backed up on the user’s PC or servers at work or home (sometimes both). And the PCs and servers may be backed up, as well. All it takes is a "syncing" between the PDA and the PC and the user is back in business.
Besides, PDA users ask, what happens if a paper calendar is lost or stolen?
The jump to electronic can be daunting, especially if the number of contact names and numbers is high – but the reward for doing it is huge.
Stapleton, who is president of the IBS Group and writes a sales column for SBT, used to put off compiling his monthly expense reports until the end of the month when he would carve out a two- to three-hour block of time on a Saturday morning.
"It’s so easy to do them on the Palm now that it’s the first thing I do on the airplane," Stapleton says of the expense-report software included on his Palm IIIx. "Everything is done (right away), so those periodic chunks of time that I used to have to block out to do expenses and other types of organizing, I don’t have to do any more. And that, to me, is a quality-of-life issue. It’s not just 3-Comm hype."
Quality of life is one reason Pamela Moss, an account executive with High Gear, bought a PalmPilot for her husband Andy. The couple, who both work, use the PalmPilots to keep track of each other’s schedules to know who’s available to pick up and drop off their two daughters at school and babysitters.
Pam Moss was a reluctant convert to PalmPilots, having used Franklin Planners and the contact management software ACT! to keep track of her schedule. But High Gear, which – among other things – creates customized application programs for linking PDAs with proprietary and canned software programs, created its own Internet contact application that links to Palms.
"I’m able to specify people on my hot list and download it to the Palm so I don’t have to re-type it," Moss says. "I always have my most frequently-used numbers with me now, which was always an issue. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used that."
Both Stapleton and Moss have invested in full-sized, foldout keyboards that attach to their PalmPilots. Moss uses it to take notes during meetings and then uploads those notes into her contact management system. Stapleton, who spends a lot of time on the road, uses the keyboard and a modem add-on to respond to e-mail and for typing notes. In fact, he’s used his Palm and the two add-ons to replace traveling with his laptop.
"I think what happens is, people travel and they have their laptops, and by default, it’s just one of those things they pack," Stapleton says. "Unless they have to use it to demo their software or something like that, for the most part, the only thing people are using (a laptop) for when they travel is checking e-mail and maybe using Word."
While PalmPilot (www.palm.com) is the market leader in PDAs, there are other players, including Pocket PCs that run on the Windows CE operating system. Pocket PCs feature color screens, while most Palm-related PDAs have black-and-white screens (with the exception of the Palm IIIc). But if you use a Macintosh computer, Pocket PCs aren’t for you; they sync only with Windows PCs. Palm-based PDAs can sync with either format.
The most notable Palm-based PDA not made by Palm is the Handspring Visor Deluxe (www.handspring.com) which is less expensive ($250) than higher-end Palms, but which includes an expansion slot for 31 attachments, such as a digital camera.
Pocket PCs include Hewlett-Packard’s Jordana 548 (www.jp.com), Casio’s Cassiopeia EM500 (www.casio.com) and Compaq’s iPAQ H3650 (www.compaq.com).
The Compaq iPAQ is so hot that they don’t even hit the shelves in retail stores. John Kurtz, vice president of commercial sales at Coakley Bros., is anxiously awaiting his iPAQ order.
The company, primarily known for its moving and storage business, wanted to make its services more efficient by using iPAQs on site when estimating and inventorying commercial clients’ offices. The current method involves paper checklists that require further inputting on laptops. The information entered on the laptops is extracted by a data-collecting software which converts it into truckloads and personnel needs. The laptops are just too heavy to carry around an office environment, according to Kurtz.
"It’s a real long, drawn-out process to do that," Kurtz explains. "With those handheld computers, we can do that on site. It automatically adds those quantities and fills in our spreadsheet for us, and then we can sync. It’s a huge timesaver, it’s huge for our image with the customer and it makes us more efficient."
Kurtz said he decided to go with a Windows-based PDA because Coakley Bros. already invested resources developing Excel spreadsheets and they use Outlook as their contact management software.
"The way we look at it, the Palm’s more of an organizer and a date book, which we need," Kurtz says, "but we wanted the whole world and the iPAQ provided that for us."
