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PDA SOS
Users of Personal Digital Assistants cry help
By ERIC ELLIS
September 30, 1999
Web posted at 1 a.m. Hong Kong time, 1 p.m. EDT
Let's be honest here. You bought one of those little PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, such as 3Com's Palm Pilot) because they were cool and gave you a dynamic "Action Man" or "Super Woman" look, just like those groovy vibrating StarTAC handphones and your Diesel jeans in regulation city black.
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And--sigh--you are reminded of that every time you enter details into the little box: the type is small, the interface is cumbersome, you probably lost that little pencil and even the ones that are supposed to translate handwriting are imperfect. Admit it, appearances might be everything but it's a drag.
Your company's IT specialists reckon they are a drag as well. That's because manufacturers have yet to perfect the connection between your--or rather your company's--laptop or desktop computer, and your funky PDA.
Sure, the makers make great claims and generally speaking they're sort of right. But you still almost need a degree in computer science to do something. That insistent salesperson in that little backstreet Kowloon electronics shop or in Singapore's Sim Lim Center wasn't prepared to disabuse you of the notion that your data is easily up- or downloadable in and out of your box. Why, the guy may as well be selling bags of rice!
Electronics are a commodity in Asia and PDAs are a grownup's Gameboy. The problem is that PDAs are becoming to computers what mopeds are to cars. I mean that the average PDA, like Compaq's Aero or the Palm Pilot, costs about US$350-400, while you don't get into the decent computer market for less than 2K. That means you buy your own PDA and your company buys your computer, and when they do they buy to specification and in bulk. However, the PDA comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes--one size does not fit all in this market. And with computer viruses multiplying like an outbreak of Ebola, companies generally don't like software they can't control going into their systems.
But as you build your contact list, you naturally worry that your entire life is stuck inside one or the other, so you try to down- and upload into one with the other as backup. That's when the company IT guys get cranky. When that process is beyond you, as it invariably is, your instinct is to ask them just before you hurl your box and your sanity across the office. By rights, it's not their job to fix your PDA, and I'm sure your boss would be none too pleased if he or she knew how much time it took either.
I know this because I spent much of last weekend trying to do it for my wife. She is a recent entry to the PDA world and quickly fell in love with her Sharp Zaurus, inputting her War and Peace-like stack of biz cards. Then as she was grumbling about its deficiencies, she spotted a groovier-still Compaq Aero. Naturally she wanted that instead--but had already inputted her cards into the Zaurus.
Unable to transfer the Zaurus to the Aero and neither to her company desktop, she asked me to do it via my (non-company) PC. A weekend later, her data was still obstinately stuck in her PDA, and I had Zaurus software stuck on my hard drive that refuses to uninstall. So now I'm cranky too. Then she reluctantly asked the company techies for help, and they agreed to give it a go. It may be one of the worst professional decisions they ever made. One had flown all the way from New York to install a new company system and here he was spending a day trying to solve my wife's contact book problem.
Finally, success. Sort of. Her data now sits in the office computer, via the techie's private computer. It has yet to migrate to her new Aero and it's unclear if it can. In short: a major nightmare.
As our electronic lifestyle gets even more wired, these issues will become more of a problem. And PDAs are set to become even more sophisticated: we'll use them to access the Net, collect e-mail and word-process. They'll be just like handheld computers. So the solution might be to start issuing employees with office-compatible PDAs just as they are given computers to use at work. But that's an extra expense, and we all know what employers think about that. Expect chaos and frustration for some time to come yet.
Write to us at mail@web.timeasia.com
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