Productivity

Everyone would enjoy using a PDA if they won one for free, but in terms of figuring out if you need one, outside of the medical field, the number one tool for a PDA must be information management such as appointments, tasks, and email. If you're just keeping track of phone numbers, you're probably better off just programming it into your cell phone. So let's see what makes Windows Mobile 2003 perfect for these tasks.

The Today Screen

Outlook users will be very familiar with the Today Screen. When you turn on your PDA (if you want), the PDA will display the Today Screen, an easy overview of what you need to do today. You'll see what upcoming appointments you have coming up (in the format of your choice), any unread email, and a list of active tasks. Plug-ins for the PDA will allow you to add a "Quick Launch" bar, or make even more changes to the look and feel of this screen.

The standard Today Screen

The Today screen can be customized to your preference. This example is done entirely with freeware

From this description, you might think that it's a pretty stupid/silly application. That's true, it's not particularly complex, but again, buying a PDA isn't like buying a piece of hardware. A useful PDA needs to be easy to use and the Today Screen, though simple in concept, makes Pocket PC ideal.

Outlook Optimized Contacts and Calendar

Up until this month, the Palm PDAs have kept their information management applications to a minimum. The Palm Tungsten T, for example, could only keep a maximum note length of 4KB, a limitation from the early days of development. The Sony Clie's standard Palm OS application only supports one address per contact – what if you want to assign a home and work address to a particular individual, or in permanent versus school address?

Pocket Outlook

You can store all sorts of data

With the Pocket PC, the design goals were built around Microsoft Outlook meaning that these more complex types of data can be properly databased. You can have multiple addresses per invididual, or probably more useful, have multiple email addresses per individual.

Pocket Office Applications

Pocket PC comes with Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, and Pocket Outlook. Pocket Word isn't the best word processor in that it does not support tables, but it does feature spell check, find/replace, bulleted lists, embedded images and rich font formatting. This makes it very useful for taking quick notes or, with a keyboard, working on many different types of documents.

Pocket Word

Pocket Excel is the cream of the crop, with an excellent feature set. Now, if you recall, my very first PDA featured a full 100% version of Lotus 1-2-3. Pocket Excel isn't as full featured as the desktop version (no graphics or scripting), but it does features all of the financial, math, trig, and standard statistics you might need. You can even have multiple sheets in a workbook and use functions like Sort and AutoFilter. It's pretty useful for me since I can keep track of benchmarks I'm running at FiringSquad, or track of lab trends in the hospital.

Pocket Excel

A modest set of functions

Pocket Outlook is actually far more useful than I would have initially thought. This email client can be used online, allowing you to check and send email if you had a WiFi, Bluetooth, LAN, or Modem (all optional) connection. For me, this comes in most handily as a passive email tool. Although the PalmOS supposedly had an email application, the Pocket PC version actually works. It syncs messages all the time and you can draft emails on the go that get sent once you link with your main PC. So why is offline reading of email useful?

The Pocket Outlook Inbox

How many times has someone emailed you with the plan to meet at a certain place at a certain time (i.e. "conference will start at 3pm at room N255 instead of the 8th floor meeting room") and you were too lazy to update your appointment book? You think to yourself, "Doh, I know the info is in my email but I deleted the message off the server when I downloaded it to my PC!" Having a reliable, multi-folder supporting email client is actually quite useful.

The Best Input Method on Any Current PDA

Pocket PC 2002 and 2003 devices are great because they offer a wide range of input methods.

You can have a software keyboard, which lets you hunt and peck for letters on the screen. This can be useful for someone initially starting with a PDA. Getting a real keyboard add-on is also a useful tool if you have the money.

Keyboard

You also have a Letter Recognizer which is basically "Jot", and allows you to write one letter at a time. Depending on which portion of the screen you write on, it'll be upper case or lower case. Some of these letters are normal looking block letters while others need to be written in a special manner.

Letter Recognizer (similar to Jot)

Transcriber is a handwriting recognition tool that works with both cursive and printed text. It's actually surprisingly accurate and is smart enough to wait until the CPU is idle before it starts processing, ensuring that you maintain system responsiveness. For someone with good handwriting, this is a very feasible method.

A brief description of Transcriber

You can write in cursive or print

The accuracy is surprisingly good

The best input is Microsoft's Block Recognizer. Remember when I said Palm's Graffiti was the best thing ever? Microsoft thought that too, so they reverse engineered it and essentially copied it with Block Recognizer. Just one problem … it turned out that Palm Graffiti infringed upon patents developed from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and Palm was forced to take out Graffiti from their operating systems. Here's the even crazier part. Microsoft's Graffiti clone, which works just like the original Palm input to the end user, doesn't infringe upon the patent because of the technical details. I don't know what those details are, and Microsoft is clearly doing the best to keep them secret from their competitors at Palm.

Simulated Graffiti

Palm's Graffiti 2 is marketed as an improved input method developed by Jot. This is basically identical Microsoft's Character Recognizer. In our experience, we don't find this to be the case because it still requires the user to learn a special alphabet, but lacks the same reward that the original Graffiti and Block Recognizer offers in terms of speed. Also worth pointing out is that Palm PDA's only have Graffiti 2 and the keyboard. Pocket PC 2002 has those same options with the additional choices of the original Graffiti and the handwriting recognition.