It was hard separating from my Palm handheld. When I went back to paper, I had to give up a pocket-sized a way to get online and send email, the ability to enter an address once and synch it up on every computer I'll ever own, reading newspaper articles and playing games in the palm of my hand.... But give it up I did. And it's been over half a year since I've thought of the darn thing.
Until today. I friend emailed me directions to a place we're meeting this weekend, and as I printed them, cut them up, and slipped the resulting strip of paper into my Pocket Filo, I had a flashback of cutting and pasting the directions into iCal, attached right to the relevant event. When I synched up at the end of the day, they'd be on my Palm forever. Just a few more clicks, and I could make an Address Book entry with the directions attached as well. If we meet at the same place again, a quick Find on my Palm will turn up the directions again, in the same mint condition as when I first pasted them in.
But then, the fact that Finds on my Palm kept turning up fatal errors was the last straw in the first place. There was the time it took 2 days to get Palm Desktop working again when my company upgraded to Tiger. (Palm no longer supports the Mac platform.) I lost another week of my life trying to set up my documents in StickyBrain when I decided to use iCal and Address Book -- iCal has no way to synch with Palm memos.
...Anybody wanna buy a Palm Tungsten T3?
I find the two can live side-by-side. Tha main mistakes people make is that a Palm (or any PDA) is only any good for data that was digital in the first place and that any form of serious data entry or human input is still far too sophisticated. I bought a Palm Zire simply for having my Outlook Calendar and Contacts with me so I'm not duplicating effort by writing them down. For making detailed notes or plans PDAs are just no good.
ReplyDeleteI think this, and the administration/technical failures of them has made sure they have not seen the end of Filofax, nor will they for many years to come. It is an irony that 5 or 6 years people were predicting the end of personal organisers yet year-on-year sales of PDAs have fallen with some companies, like Sharp and Sony, have abandoned the market completely.
>...Anybody wanna buy a Palm Tungsten T3?
ReplyDeleteNope - I've already got one gathering dust here. And a Tungsten T.
The Handspring Visor Edge is gathering dust at my parents' house. There's a couple of Palm M105s somewhere around here too, a Psion Series 5, a Series 3a, and I think somewhere an old Organiser II Model CM. No idea what ended up happening with the *other* Series 3a, or the two original Series 3 machines. The Sharp organizer probably went in the bin.
My wife is still happily using the iPaq hx4700, though - alongside her Filofax.
I've basically quit using my Tungsten T3, too, except for contacts and the voice recorder (now and then). I had used Palm for years but the little screen does not give a big picture for one's life. I'm using the Moleskine 18-month calendar, and it's working for me pretty well, but if I need something more elaborate, I'm definitely going Filofax A5. . .
ReplyDeleteHey, "Anon" --
ReplyDeleteAin't it the truth about that small screen? I tried to use just the Palm with a desktop and/or laptop computer for a while, but there's no substitute for being able to think on paper. I found I just couldn't get the big picture from a Palm either. Desktop organizer software is good for calendars, and there really is nothing better than a Palm for contacts and similar portable database information, but the Filofax is the only thing that can do it all!