INDIA (ZDNet India)-- Well, no prizes for guessing this one. PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) have pervaded so many applications that it is getting difficult to ignore their presence in the computing scene, not just abroad but in India as well. And by PDAs we are not just referring to systems that allow you to maintain schedules or calculate but systems that are capable of performing most computing tasks.
Take a look around you. People are using their handhelds to write letters in Word and do their accounts in Excel. They are browsing the Web using their PDA’s clip-on modem, or hooking it up to a mobile phone to check their e-mail.
Somewhere right now, someone is playing Quake on his teeny weeny Pocket PC, while someone else is using her Palm to send SMS messages to a mobile phone, or chat on ICQ. Linux fans are installing a stripped down version of the OS for the PDA and journalists are using theirs to take notes, compile news reports and meet deadlines. Need more persuasion? Here are some dedicated PDA users who will surely make a convert out of you.
Getting the job done
Meet Ashish Gupta. He stumbled on to PDAs quite by accident and was so taken in that he eventually founded the Indian Palm User Group (IPUG). “It all started when my dad brought home a Palm from his travels. He wanted me to check it out and see if it was useful. After sometime I got so hooked that I never gave it back.”
A busy executive, Gupta has found his faithful travelling companion in his Palm PDA. “When I leave home, I just download mail from my PC on to my Palm and check it during the commute. I also read eBooks and online newspapers, which I download from my PC on to the Palm.”
Whenever he goes out of station, he uses his PDA modem to stay connected. “All I have to do is just plug the modem into the hotel room’s telephone socket and get on the Internet. In case this is not possible, I use the IR port of my PDA to connect to my mobile phone and get connected to the Net.”
Gupta is among the 70 per cent of PDA users who use a product from the popular Palm family of devices, developed by 3Com. Other PDA manufacturers include Handspring, Compaq, HP, Psion, Sharp, Hitachi, and IBM. Palm and Pocket PC are leaders in the PDA spectrum. Both have their own operating systems on which their devices run.
While the Palm OS has been designed keeping in mind simplicity and maximum efficiency, the Pocket PC OS is a variation of the Windows CE system (the operating system from Microsoft for the handheld devices). While Palm is still a hot favourite among PDA-users, Pocket PC based devices are also doing their fair share of personal digital assistantship.
Janees E K, an M.Tech student of Computer Science at IIT, Mumbai, is the proud owner of one such device. Gifted with a Cassiopeia during his B.Tech days at M.E.S College of Engineering, Kerala, he lost no time in putting it to task.
“I found that it was easy to draw the diagrams that we had as part of the course on my Cassiopeia. It was very easy to organise my notes afterwards as I didn’t have to worry about losing any paper notes.” He uses the PDA to work on Word and Excel, and for playing games. Janees also had a go at developing applications for Windows CE. “I did some programming using Visual C++ for the CE toolkit.”
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