buying a new PDA. What direction to go?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My last PDA crashed recently, causing me to lose an unholy amount of data because I grew lazy and didn’t backup properly. The PDA I had been using (an old but excellent - until now - Palm Tungsten T3) rarely crashed to where a hard reset was required (going to the back and sticking a pin or end of a paperclip into the reset hole).

Even when I had to do that, my data was always there. So, I never had to worry about losing contact info, or anything else, for that matter. If I forgot to put the palm on its base to charge, it still wouldn’t lose its data. It was great. And then one day last week, I went to grab my PDA from its base, and noticed it didn’t have a charge at all. It wasn’t sitting properly on it, and it seemed to just run down on its own. No problem, I thought. Just charge it back up and all the data will be there. Wrong.

It basically looked like it did the day I purchased it. I had to use the stylus to re-calibrate the screen, and none of my data was there. Not even ownership data or my name.

I realized that part of my problem is that I have too much crap that has versions of everything. A phone, a PDA, a laptop, a desktop computer. Why not eliminate one of these things? I decided to rid myself of the PDA if possible, and run programs I need as well as maintain a contacts list, and whatever else right there on the phone.

Is there a phone that best meets my criteria? I see the iphone is selling for $50. That seems like a great deal, but does it, would it make a good PDA?

making phonecalls is nice, obviously, but being able to work on a spreadsheet, for example, may not be easy to do on an iphone.

Anyone have any suggestions on what phone would be the best to buy?

2

What do you want to do with your PDA? I can’t imagine a palm tungsten t3 can do anything an iPhone 3GS (the 50$ model) can’t, but I could be wrong. The biggest apparent benefit for you is that it recharges and backs up data at the same time if you use the USB port on your desktop to charge it.

3

Aside from the iPhone, there are also the various Android phones and the Blackberries. From what I gather, Blackberry is more angled towards businessmen, and from comparing my old Blackberry Curve to my iPod Touch (which is based on the iPhone, but obviously lacks certain features, such as the phone parts), the Blackberry is much more in-depth with features, while the iThingy is going to be easier to use in many ways.

I think all modern smartphones have their own various setups for making easy backups of your data (Blackberry Desktop and iTunes for the BBs and the iThingies. Dunno what Androids have.)

And of course, if you are in love with Palm, they still make a few smart phones, but I have no experience with any of them. I’m pretty sure they all run Windows Mobile now, but someone will be along shortly to correct me if I’m wrong there.

4

Palm was swallowed up by HP in the midst of their attempt to launch and promote a new mobile platform called WebOS (which comes with an emulator to run old PalmOS applications) - it looks nice, but its chief weakness is the small size of its application market.

(To the OP): Don’t buy a windows 6.x mobile device (especially not a Palm-branded one*) - it’s a truly horrible OS. And think carefully about getting a Windows 7 mobile device - iOS and Android are by far the market leaders (which is a really big factor, because of the way applications are delivered more or less exclusively through a single market portal).

*Palm’s implementation of Windows Mobile on devices with non-standard square displays made for a really sucky user experience - almost no third party applications would work on it (well, they would work, but you just couldn’t see the bottom third of them)

5

If your main concern is data backup, consider the cloud. Android phones, for example, sync all your contacts to your Google account so that you can access them across any device with internet access (your phone, your computer, new phones, new computers, tablets, etc.)

If you use Google Docs, they’re likewise saved to the cloud so you never have to worry about losing your data with your phone.

(Based on the premise that the chance of Google losing your data is probably smaller than that of you yourself losing it.)

6

I love this about my Android phone (and, especially the calendar sync).

I’m assuming iOS must also do something pretty similar though?

7

iOS is eventually going to use iCloud. It currently uses MobileMe. It’s all automatic. You can also use Google and others.

For cloud documents, I use MobileMe and Dropbox.

8

Yes, android or iphone. Those are your choices at the moment. If you’re not on or, can’t be on AT&T or Verizon (if you’re in the US) then the iphone is out, so that leaves you with whatever android based phones are available on your carrier of choice. If you’re going to go the android route, make sure you get one which runs at least android 2.2 “Froyo”. 2.2 is a big improvement over 2.1 “Eclair”. 2.3 “Gingerbread” (alphabetically named after sweet snacks) is even better, but I don’t know how many phones have it. Regardless of what a salesperson promises, don’t expect the manufacturer and carrier to ever release an update for the phone you buy. If they do, great, but don’t buy based on any promise that an upgrade is coming soon.

The android doesn’t sync with your computer the way the Palm did. It will use it’s own network connection to automatically sync with google calendar and contacts. It can also sync to an Exchange calendar/email if you have an account like that at work. There are other solutions for documents, such as Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs, etc. iphone does still sync through itunes to move data to it. It probably syncs calendars over the network somehow, but a user would have to explain that.

Android and iphone won’t lose data when their battery dies, unlike the palm. The downside is that you won’t get nearly the battery life out of either that your palm gave you. Expect to charge every night, at a minimum.

9

I like my Blackberry, largely because of the hardware keyboard (and the fact that I get replacements out of my Dad’s company for essentially nothing).
Also, I don’t really consider it PDA unless there’s butt squeezin’ going on.

10

There’s an app for that. :smiley:

11

[moderating]
Moved from GQ to IMHO.
[/moderating]

12

Assuming you’re not planning to make a leap to a smartphone at this point, an iPod Touch is a very good alternative.

We moved from Palm to iPod Touches about a year ago. We keep the contacts / calendars synched to a Google account, so it’s “in the cloud”, and that a) provides backup, and b) lets my husband and me keep our info automatically synched (something that Palm never addressed, and third-party tools did only badly).

There are steps you can go through to convert your information to Google. You should be able to find that online. Basically, though, I had to do a dump of the desktop versions, then import the calendar info into a Yahoo calendar, do a dump of that, then import THAT into Google. I don’t recall why - something about google not being able to handle the Palm output.

I don’t think the two-step process was required for the contacts.

We did lose some calendar entries, as I recall (mostly older stuff), and other repeating dates got messed up, but most data got through in a usable format. You’ll want to go through the data in Google Calendar and do a lot of cleanup - fortunately, since you can do that from a browser, it’s easy if a bit time-consuming.

The best part is: if you do switch to a smartphone in the future, if you’re using Google for your stuff now, it’s quite literally trivial to get the data into the smartphone. I’m now using an Android phone and it took about 10 minutes to get everything over.

One thing to beware of if you go with an ipod touch: There’s a setting by which new contacts (created on the touch) get saved either to the google account or to the ipod. We were going nuts trying to figure out why new stuff wasn’t getting ported to each other’s handhelds, until we found that setting. Sheesh.

13

Heh - actually we did lose some functionality. Possibly not stuff the OP is worried about, but:

Pocket Quicken. Yeah. there’s mint.com - but if you’re a desktop Quicken user, that is no substitute; it doesn’t talk to the desktop version at all. I really miss being able to enter stuff on the fly and have it easily copied to the desktop.

Grocery-shopping software. We were hardcore HandyShopper users. The closest thing you’ll find (for some of the features) is SplashShopper and that tool, on the iphone, is slow to the point of being completely unusable. Not just poky - I mean in some modes, any accidental keypress will cause it to recalculate everything and lock it up for 15 minutes. I did finally find a replacement, for the Android.

And there are certainly other tools that are OK for groceries, just not as full-featured. Pocket Quicken is the one thing that’s proven to be irreplaceable.

14

What would that replacement be? I was a big SplashData fan when I used my Palm and haven’t found something that handles the SplashShopper checklists from ym Droid.

15

ToMarket. The developer actually specifically targeted the Handyshopper crowd.

The main feature that I was looking for was the ability to have a single item independent of the stores - then associate that item to any or all of a bunch of different stores, and log which aisle it appears in for each one. e.g. I need bread, eggs and milk - and don’t know which store I’ll be shopping in so I just check “bread”, “eggs” and “milk” off on the list. Then when I decide where I’m going to shop, I can filter / sort items by that store.

Say in Safeway, eggs are in aisle 3, milk in aisle 5, and bread is in aisle 10. At Giant, eggs are in 12, milk is in 2, and bread is in aisle 7.

If I say “Safeway” and sort by aisle, my list reads
3 - eggs
5 - milk
10 = bread

If I say Giant, and sort by aisle, my list reads
2 - milk
7 - bread
12 - eggs

So I can sort things by aisle regardless of which store I’m in.

SplashShopper was the only tool I could find on the iPhone / iPod Touch that did this and it was intolerably slow. They have no near-term plans on releasing it for the Android. ToMarket is the only one I’ve found that does that on the Android, and the developer is VERY responsive to feature requests.

Others have the ability to associate items to multiple stores by either having them duplicated in each store’s list (so if I check off eggs at Safeway, maybe I forget to get them while I’m at Giant), or part of an “all stores” list.

The one thing ToMarket doesn’t do is cloud synching - you add eggs to your list, and with some other tools, eggs appear on your spouse’s list.

My review is at the Amazon appstore :).

16

Thanks all, for the advice and stories.

Looks like I’m going to look into an android based on this thread so far. The ipad I don’t view as an option, because it’s not as portable as a cell phone or a palm pilot.

I love that I can have everything backed up on google as well, since as someone mentioned, the odds of google losing the data is low.

Another question from an ignorant android (potential) owner. I currently use virginmobile for my cell phone carrier. If I “jailbreak” the android, can I use it to place and receive calls?

I’d really like to start minimizing my technology requirements, and it sounds like the android will solve most of my portability problems.
Thanks all

17

I’m a big fan of the new Windows Phone OS. The OneNote integration is the greatest thing since sliced bread and there isn’t really a comparable tool on iOS of Android. I think Evernote is a 3rd party app that operates similarly, but as a MS Office user OneNote is way more seamless.

I suspect that while there are pros and cons to every mobile phone OS, getting one that best replaces the PDA experience might be key for the OP. In my opinion OneNote is by far the closest thing to a PDA experience for 2011 there is.

18

No. Virgin Mobile uses the Sprint network in the US which is a CDMA network. CDMA phones can’t be used on other networks. Virgin Mobile however does sell Android devices however. Sprint, for a similar price on the same network, will get you an evern wider range of devices including WP7 and Palm.

19

Just to make sure there wasn’t a misunderstanding: an iPod Touch is about the size of the Tungsten - the iPad is of course a lot larger!! For a number of months, I carried my iPod Touch (for PDA stuff) and my dumb phone (for calls and texts).

That said - an Android-based phone would certainly meet all your needs (I certainly enjoy mine!). If you’re using Virgin Mobile, check into whatever data plans they have. I don’t know if it’s possible to run an Android phone without a data plan.

I wonder if you could buy a used Android, not activate it, and just use it as a PDA. They do work via wi-fi so if you’re near a hotspot, you could still use it for email and for doing the cloud synching.

20

Thanks… I did misunderstand, and didn’t read iPod Touch. I saw iPad. My mistake.

and your last paragraph sums up exactly what I’d like to do in a perfect world. Use an android like a PDA without necessarily activating it for now. That’s why I originally was looking into iPhones that were being sold for 50 bucks. That’s a hell of a lot cheaper than anything else out there with that kind of functionality.

I don’t understand ‘jailbreaking’ at all, but from what I read, it will permit you to use another carrier besides AT&T. If that’s true, perhaps it will permit me to use no carrier and just use it as a PDA?