Pda Buyers Guide

The low-down on PDAs and what they can do for you: PDAs are everywhere these days. They are used by a wide array of professions and come in all shapes and sizes. Of course, one of the most common types you might see these days, if you live in a city, is smartphones. But the classic pocket pcs and palms are still up to date and offer many alluring features.

The first decision you will need to make when buying a PDA is whether you want to go with the Microsoft based pocket pcs that run window mobile or a Palm based OS Device. Today’s Palm “Pilots” have not only lost the name from the old days but are far from being pilot devices and are rather tried and true vehicles for jumping on the PDA bandwagon. There are also several snazzy PC versions including Dell’s line of Axims, the latest being the Dell Axim x51v. And the Dell Axim x51v is a beautiful item for media lovers…but I digress.

Certainly choosing a PDA is crucial, however, this article is about the reasons you might want one in the first place. For example, never forgetting an appointment again. You can program the rest of your life in these things! Input an appointment and program to repeat every other week, or every 8 days or every 9 years,… whatever! And this baby will hold all your contacts. Okay, it’s an electronic planner and address book…what’s new, right? With a few quick downloads, your PDA can also replace your reference books or at least make them more portable. I carry my English dictionary and thesaurus on mine as well as a Spanish-English and English-French dictionary all on my PDA. Furthermore, I take notes and use the device as a digital recorder with one push of a button.

In some of the older devices, digital cameras were built in but it quickly became apparent to manufacturers that this was not one of the key features customers were looking for in their PDAs (and so now they put them in cell phones). PDAs are also wonderful for entertainment on the go too. They can double (triple, quadruple?) as decent MP3 players, can play video and you can even watch TV on them. With the slots for storage cards as big as 2 gigs that are now available, your PDA can carry an awful lot of media.

New games are developed all the time for PDAs and the existing library is large. From graphics heavy videogames to arcade style games and mind-bogglers like Sudoku, PDAs now pride themselves on being as smart as chessmasters and smooth as professional skateboarders. With new applications popping up all the time for PDAs, people are bound to find that they can’t go long without their PDA after using on for a short period of time. Try one out and see if you don’t enjoy using it as a universal remote to turn off your television so you can hear that new MP3 you just got, serenading from your PDA’s speakers!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.