New World Order

Let’s say you’re on the beach. As you watch a sailboat slice across the Pacific, you get a great idea about how to solve the problem that’s bugging you and everyone else at work. You decide you need to immediately let your colleagues know about your brainstorm.

Or, maybe you simply remember you haven’t sent birthday greetings to your mother in Missouri.

Enter the personal digital assistant--PDA. Or, if you like, call it the personal communicator. Or digital diary. Or palmtop computer with a PIM (personal information manager). Regardless of what you call them, they are proliferating--in numbers and variety.

So, there on the beach, you whip out your personal digital organizer with its “wireless communications card” attached. Not even needing a cell phone, you can call your fax number at work to send your brainstorm or call your mother’s fax with a birthday greeting. Voila! You’re communicating--personally.

PDAs are those hand-held organizers that can catalog everything from birth dates and e-mail addresses to appointments, grocery lists, phone and fax numbers. A PDA can plug you into the Internet, run software programs that calculate tidal heights or your tax liability, track and analyze your latest golf game, record and play back audio or display an animated version of the “Three Little Pigs.”

Beyond the factor of which ones can or cannot display fairy tales, other distinctions exist among these hand-held devices.

At the lower end is the digital organizer. It essentially replicates the paper-based daybooks that people have been lugging around since the Filofax glory days of the 1980s. Digital organizers cost anywhere from $40 to $250.

But PDAs have a broader range of capabilities, from e-mail to fax, spreadsheet and drag-and-drop functions to “connectivity” from desktop to laptop and beyond. They generally cost from $250 to $700.

Software and even Web browsers and clip-on modems have been developed for these. Some, such as those made by British-based Psion, have programming capabilities so sophisticated that Psion has developed a cult following, complete with online user groups and Web sites.

Those made by Sharp, Sony and Casio have backlighted screens for easy readability in dark places. Sharp has a new one with a color screen. The Psion model has Lotus spreadsheets built in.

Other PDAs can use time management and planning programs such as Microsoft Schedule+, Lotus Organizer and Sidekick for Windows 95. Even the traditionally based paper systems, such as Day-Timer and Franklin, now have gone digital.

Nonetheless, some computer lovers, saying they’re waiting for more memory and more speed at lower prices, have yet to buy their first PDA. But techno-mavens say hand-held computers and organizers are definitely becoming a part of our collective consumer lives.

“As the price-points drop, it’s no longer an elitist technology,” says Lloyd Wasser, a computer journalist who heads Widget Software in Toronto. In the last two to three years, he says, PDAs have undergone radical improvements. “These devices now let us do a whole lot more in a shorter period of time.”

To a degree, a trip to any neighborhood electronics store, or to any of the PDA Web sites, confirms this. The prices are indeed dropping as the memory capabilities are increasing. At the same time, the devices possess greater connectivity to desktop computers, telephones, faxes, modems and the Internet. Many have “cable-free” connectivity via the use of infrared devices that transmit information back and forth between palmtop and desktop.

In addition, some PDAs, such as Casio’s Cassiopeia and Hewlett-Packard’s 200LX, use Microsoft Windows CE, which is similar to the now-familiar Windows 95.

Many PDAs, such as the Pilot from U.S. Robotics and Apple’s Newton, have pen-like styluses for jotting notes on a “note pad” screen, allowing for handwriting to be converted into type. In some cases, the PDA can copy handwriting or diagrams. To write with the stylus, however, often requires the user to learn how to fashion letters properly or peck them out on a screen keyboard. Others, such as Sharp’s Zaurus, have actual keyboards.

Far lighter than laptops and capable of doing many of the same tasks, many PDAs are so small you can store them in your purse, your suit coat pocket or front shirt pocket, and certainly in a briefcase or book bag.

As a result, the ease of working these spiffy devices makes them useful for more than just computer nerds, business executives, the frequent-flier crowd or Internet-savvy students. The point has almost arrived that the consumer with little or no computer skills can easily learn to use a PDA, and certainly comfortably work a basic digital organizer.

Yet there is this caution, offered by salesman Ron Karsch as he gives a guided tour among the PDAs and digital organizers at the Good Guys in Pasadena: Spend plenty of time shopping for the PDA or organizer best suited to you.

“It’s important to take the time shopping, so you can get comfortable with them before you buy one,” says Karsch, who got his first Sharp Wizard organizer in 1988. “I’ve seen a lot of people who bought these and just let them sit in a desk drawer.”