One of the questions that I get asked most often is I heard of these PDA’s. You know everybody is carrying one now, do I need one? And if I need one, how do I pick one because there are a lot of choices out there. Well, a PDA, I mean the letters stand for Personal Data Assistant.
So it’s meant to be this tool that helps you be more productive, work more efficiently and in the terms of PDA, it’s actually for when you’re on the go. It’s for mobile users, that’s people who need to take things and run.
What the PDA does in its best form is it to carry your contacts and your calendar with you. Now you can use a PDA alone, most people will use a PDA in combination with the software that they are running on their desktop computer. It could be Outlook. It could be Act. It could some sort of contact manager, it could be just for desktop software that comes with the palm.
But the idea is that you don’t want to have contacts typed in more that one place. So if you type it in your desktop computer, then the term they use to synchronize, you’re going to synchronize that information onto your PDA. So you only type it once, you only have it in one place. But in the synchronize world, what happens is you now have your calendar and your contacts on your PDA. So if your out with a client and you need to schedule an appointment, you enter that appointment on your PDA .And if you’re doing a wireless sync where you always have connectivity then that immediately syncs back to your computer.
If you’re going to buy a PDA, the first thing you have to look at is. If you already have a cellphone, and you can’t change plans or you don’t want to change plans or you are in a contract, you then need to look at what phones that particular cellphone provider provides. Each one of them has different features. The keyboard is different. The size of the screen is different. The Blackberries have thumb wheels on both sides so you need to actually put it in your hand, look at the screen, try up the keyboard and see how comfortably you are with that particular device.
So look at first your cellphone provider then look at the one that you’re comfortable using. Now they come in with three different operating systems. Some devices come with the palm operating system, some come with Windows logo and then the blackberries have the blackberry operating systems. So usually the device you pick will come with one of those and by all, they all will do the contacts and the calendar. It’s just that each one of them has different features in different ways that you’re synchronized.
But I usually suggest to people that they choose the one that’s going to work the best in them. It’s readable that they can use the keyboards, you like to use a stylus, pick a one that have the stylus.
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