Moving from PDA

Posted on November 9, 2009 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Productivity

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

When Bonsai announced it would no longer be releasing Palm software, I felt a clenching in my chest. My PDA has been my brain for many years. But my Zire is getting old, and the new Palm devices, which run Windows Mobile (insert retching sounds here) are not to my taste. So what’s a PDA-addict to do?

The PDA Was Already Irrelevant…

I realized that I actually don’t use my PDA very much any more. With a thumb drive to transport my project list (Bonsai), passwords (Keepass) and my notes (Notestudio), I don’t use the Palm applications for those tasks. My calendar syncs from Palm to Google, and my contacts go as well (I also have a program to push the information from my Palm desktop into my iPod Classic.). I was experimenting with Remember the Milk, so my tasks were on the web.

So I stopped carrying my PDA around. With calendars and contacts on the iPod, the Palm was just one more device that I didn’t need to haul around.

I noticed, though, that I was losing track of to-dos, and a couple of times I missed appointments. It was apparent I was going to have to get something else.

I started looking around.

What to Buy?

At my peak gadget times, I was carrying a cell phone, PDA and MP3. I still want and need the functionality of all three, but I wanted to minimize as much as possible what I was carrying.

I had tried to turn my PDA into an MP3, and that didn’t work. Using my cell phone as an MP3 was marginal, but I couldn’t get my calendar onto the device.

My first thought was to go with an all-in-one device. I will not switch to Windows Mobile, though, and that eliminated many devices. I wanted something that had a lot of external applications, which eliminated the Blackberry. The iPhone was next on the list, but I really like my cell phone, and my cell phone carrier. My phone is small enough to slip into the smallest pocket, and sometimes is the only thing I carry with me. The iPhone is much bigger and would not be as flexible.

That left the iPod Touch. My only concern was that the memory needed to be big enough to handle primary MP3 duty as well as the other stuff. With the release of the 64GB model, that problem was solved.

Working with the Touch

I purchased my Touch this last weekend, and I have been slowly moving things to it. It pulled my calendar and contacts right from Google, and Remember The Milk has a great interface. There is so much software out there that I have to evaluate many more packages to find what I need. More about this in coming articles…

Photo by re-ality

---

If you enjoyed this post, please buy me a cup of coffee!