Product Review of Organizers - PDAs

Today I’ll review PDAs (personal digital assistants) – generically. It would be too complicated to review them all and there are plenty of websites that will do that for you.

The pros:
- PDAs are small, compact and convenient.
- You can store an enormous amount of information in a small space – addresses, phone numbers, calendar, files, and to-do lists.
- Some PDAs have the capacity to be used as a phone and can connect to the internet.
- A calculator is part of the menu.
- An alarm reminds you of important events or appointments, if you choose to use it.
- It interfaces with your computer and allows you to keep your information in both places.
- Information can be imported and exported to and from other PDAs.
- You can play games on it.

The cons:
- The calendar screen is small, making it hard to view the details of more than a couple of days.
- You must remember to charge it. If you don’t and your power dies, you must reprogram your settings – just happened to me today!! You can sync back all the information from your computer, but if you have entered anything onto your handheld and haven’t synced it to your computer, it is lost.
- They are more expensive than most paper or computer organizers.
- You must enter information using a stylus, which can be slower than writing. You can also write on the screen, but you must learn “graffiti” which is the handwriting the PDA can scan.

I especially love the fact that all my important information is with me at all times in a small place. The only major inconvenience I experience is not being able to see a week or month at a glance on my handheld. But whenever I’m working at my home office, I can see these on my computer.