I’ve had mine for about 3 weeks and already I am bored with it. I thought it would change my life, HA!
It’s just like all the other failed attempts to introduce some organisation into my life (somewhere to put birthdays, to-do lists, to-buy lists, tasks, musings, blah-dee-blah)
It’s an ipaq (H2210) with PocketPC on it. I have installed mahjong, a sokoban type game, the noahs ark game from msn.com, quake, radio times, and a few others.
So what’s on yours? what do you do with it?
Address book is critical to my life, so’s the calender. I’m so horridly bad at organization that I’ve got at least two or three systems for writing down school assignments, etc.
Lots and lots of games (which tend to reduce my productivity, of course. I’ve got Alchemy, Bejeweled, Collapse, Chopper Rescue, DopeWars, Dynomite, F1 Sprint, worm, Hardball, Joust, MegaBowling, pinball, solitaire, SubHunt, Tetris, and Tetris Attack, amongst others.
I’ve also got a program that provides random Yoda quotes. It amuses me; it’s like a Magic 8 ball, but Yoda.
Don’t give up, Lobsang! Truly, it took me about a month before I got into the habit of using it, and now I can’t live without it. I’ve had mine for three years now and I use it constantly.
My favorite feature is the “repeat” function in the calendar. I put dates to remember in and set them to repeat weekly (piano lessons for the Terrible Teen), monthly, and yearly (birthdays and anniversaries). I also set it to alert me a week ahead of big occasions, so I can mail out cards, and THAT has been a huge help (I used to call people the day after their birthdays and say, “Uhh… I missed it again, hope it was happy.”) The phone book is cool too, because when someone changes their phone number, or moves, I don’t have to scratch anything out or rip out pages in a book, I just backspace through their old info and enter the new info. I don’t use the to-do list much, though - I prefer the memo function to keep a running grocery list, writing prompts and ideas, etc.
Mine is a Palm, so I don’t know if yours is compatible, but for fun I have Spellbound - VERY cool - from www.silcom.com. Lots of solitaire games from smallware.com, TapDown from dejobaan.com, Bejeweled from astraware.com, Tetris from pocketexpress.com.
I am one of the hopelessly disorganized by nature, and it took me a bit to get into the hang of setting my PDA into the cradle every night, syncing it and letting it charge, then remembering to grab it in the morning, but once the routine “stuck” it stuck well, and I am so much more organized now!
Oh, I use mine daily. Even being over here in Iraq, I still use it daily. I use it to keep track of meetings, create memos, birthdays and all that good stuff you should use it for, and of course games.
Documents to Go is my fav. piece of software. It is great, powerpoint, spreadshees, word docs and such are transferable and you can edit them on the PDA itself. I love that. I have gotten good enough at it that I can keep up with a meeting using the stylus. Not too shabby. I have a Sony Clie that’s full color. Its great. I keep pictures of my girl on there and whenever I forget what I am going home to, I just take a peek.
word for the random stuff that spring into my head at odd times,
excel because i need the spreadsheet,
calender to keep my schedule,
the ever growing to-do list that i’m trying to master,
the mp3 player when i travel
and the book reader when i’m bored.
I just got a Sony Clie.
I have a checkbook program that I’ll start using (hopefully) as soon as I’m done w/ my ADD audit. Hopefully the datebook & address book will be used as well–I don’t have much to put in right now since I’ve not been using those things to date.
I aslo have some games, the idea being that they’ll cause me to keep the thing handy so that I’ll use it for important stuff.
I’m utterly worthless with organization. At a recent CHADD conference, a speaker, who works with brain damaged folks who, because of the location of the injury, have symptoms similar to ADD folks, said that PDAs (specifically Palm Pilots–more specifically Sony’s, IIRC) work for even the most intransigent disorganizers.
I’m hoping that I can make use of this.
In my PDA, I keep:
All the addresses I want to remember
All important dates I want to remember (birthdays, anniversaries, meetings, etc.)
Any quotations or short poems I want to keep handy (I’ve got a ton of these)
A file for my userids & passwords for the sites I visit that need them.
Since I got a Zire 71 for Christmas, I keep photos of Robert & my dogs with me in it. 
I keep my current ebook(s) in it. I have a French-English dictionary from Mobipocket. If I’m reading a French ebook and need to look up a work, I just tap on the word and it takes me to the definition.
I have a few games too.
I love modern technology.
I have been looking into getting a pda or pocket pc for about 3 weeks now and this thread is really giving me hope since my SO believes I wont use it and let it go to waste (very irritating).
When you synch up your pda, does it have to use outlook express?
It doesn’t use outlook express at all, it uses outlook 2002, which you get with Windows PocketPC based PDAs. If you don’t want it to synch with outlook then you can either switch off that particular synch option, or install the ‘guest’ synch program (designed to conect to computers that are not the ‘main’ sync computer, such as your comp at work)
You can put Quake on PDA’s these days? Sounds cool.
The graphics are up to scratch, quite impressive, but It’s a pain to control.
Wow! That’s really amazing. Now when will they bring out the game-controller add-on?
My PDA is in my cellphone (Nokia 3650) and the programs I use most (other than the camera software) are the e-book reader, the c64 and gameboy emulators and the VNC client. I also like using the video viewer to watch Futurama episodes on. The mini-gps was fun, but I don’t move around enough, I live, work and shop within the same network cell.
For school. Didn’t use mine much either till I got some med programs (eponyms, nemonics, diagnose database, etc). Really helpful and much quicker than looking it up on a book.
Games too. Very entertaining in long lectures.
I have had my PDA for a couple of years now. I tend to use it mostly for games and to keep addresses in the same place. I just find it hard to figure out where to carry it. It usually sits in my work bag unless I think I might need it while I am out because taking it and my cell phone would be a pita.
[hijack]I am looking for a good free hangman game though. Does anyone know a good site to look for free/cheap Palm OS stuff?[/hijack]
I keep a list of books I want to read in the memo feature, so I can pick them up cheap at used book stores or library book sales. I like to read series in order, so it helps me keep track of what is the next book when I’m catching up on an older series. You’d be surprised how often this is not listed (or not listed accurately) in the front of the book.
I also keep track of ingredients that can be subsituted. For example, if they are out of red snapper, what is another similar fish to use in the recipe.
I also have some basic recipes, like fruit crisp, that I keep in there, so if I see some really good fruit, say peaches in season, I can make sure to pick up the rest of the ingredients.
I made a database with a grocery list. I quit using this after a while, it only seemed beneficial when I was really putting a lot of thought into cooking. But the idea was I could very easily come up with a grocery list sorted in order of the aisles of the store I shop in. Then I’d walk through the aisles and click things off the list on my PDA (geek!!!). I had to buy a separate program Han D Base, to make the database.
Also, I am in Toastmasters - a club to improve public speaking skills www.toastmasters.org Our club meetings include telling a joke of the day, learning a word of the day, and asking people questions for them to practice extemporaneous speaking. Sometimes the person who was supposed to prepare one of those parts of the meeting can’t make it, and I keep a backup list of jokes, words and questions so I can be prepared to fill in. I also use a separate program I bought, called Brainforest, to outline and practice speeches.
I got some of these ideas by getting a book from the library on PDAs. Reading the book was free and time well invested.
I’ve owned my Palm Tungsten E for, ooh… looks at watch er, about four days.
I’m still in the process of adding all my contacts and personal information that I’d written down in my diary, as well as converting various spreadsheets to a PDA-friendly format and adding a few photos.
Only game I’ve got for it so far is chess (a pretty basic version) - anyone have recommendations for free Palm shareware sites?
I foresee it becoming indispensable once I’ve got everything set up and filled in just how I like it. No regrets so far.
Couple of sites for freeware and shareware come to mind for those who asked:
www.handango.com
Palm OS’s own site (Palm.com)
www.5star.freeserve.com
Handspring (whooops… just double-checked that. Handspring and Palm have melded into www.palmOne.com)
www.PDAstreet.com
www.mobilegeneration.com
That neural tharapist that spoke at the thingie said that these things are great for people who have failed miserably at every other organizing tool. She said that she has great success. That’s why I got the games, so I’ll be more likely to have it with me.
Mine syncs to its own program. But I don’t have outlook at home, which is a bonus because I really don’t like outlook.
Oh, for freeware, I’ve found:
http://www.freewarepalm.com/games/games.shtml
For Yatzee: http://www.mirwoj.opus.chelm.pl/palm/index.html
I always hated my cellphone because it wasn’t a PDA. I refused to carry both a cellphone and a PDA. I wanted a device that was both.
I found one. The Kyocera 7135.
It’s both a Palm PDA and a cellphone. I can clip this thing to my belt, and I have ONE device that does anything I can reasonably ask of a PDA or a cellphone. I can play games, keep track of my ever-changing schedule, show off my kids’ pictures, play MP3 files, and still keep my promise to my wife that I would carry a cellphone.
I’ll add one more site for free Palm software: www.palmopensource.com