•  Using technology to manage information. •  PDAs - the good, the bad and the ugly. •  Palm, Inc. •  Handspring •  Sony •  Compaq •  Hewlett Packard •  Microsoft

One of the biggest challenges of managing a New Economy career is simply dealing with the information overload. It can cause even the most the most organized person to wish for the days of administrative assistants.

It's an information jungle out there, and if this is your first taste of the New Economy, you may be facing the technological rain forest alone for the first time in your career.

But what the New Economy taketh away, it also maketh up for. You may not have hot and cold running assistants, but you can get some really cool technology to help you manage four major categories of personal information:

1. Schedule and Contact Information
2. Telephone calls (part 2)
3. Electronic mail (part 3)
4. Documents and presentations (part 4)

We'll review all four of these categories in the following articles. First, let's talk about PDAs.

Schedule and Contact Information -- The PDA

The name itself sounds ambitious -- Personal Digital Assistant -- but the PDAs really do live up to their hype. Day-Timers and similar paper-based systems were good at helping you manage your calendar and meeting notes, but not so good at keeping up-to-date personal data on your contacts, not to mention the hassle of replacing and recopying pages. PDAs are great at both -- and more, thanks to email programs and games like solitaire.

The Palm Pilot was the first truly successful PDA, and others quickly followed. The Handspring Visor and forthcoming Sony SD are both based on the Palm operating system. Other devices, from companies like Compaq and Hewlett Packard, are based on Microsoft's Windows CE. Like most Microsoft products, the first two versions of Windows CE were failures, but the third release (called Pocket PC) apparently gets it right.

If you're the type who waits for just the right thing to buy, you may want to wait until the next generation of PDAs gives you a clear choice. But, because of things like incompatible expansion slots, the future looks even more uncertain than the present.

Besides, right now you can buy a Palm Vx and get some immediate help with your information management. At $399 list (and it sells pretty much at list, even from discount houses) it isn't cheap. But it's the best. (All prices as of September 2000)

The Vx is the slimmest of the Palms, but it carries the largest cargo of usable memory -- 8 megabytes. Its infrared port has become the most popular toy of Palm nerds who zap everything from business cards to software applications at each other. Its applications feature subtle but telling improvements over previous versions with different font sizes and several calendar views.

The big advantage of a PDA is that it allows you to be digital end-to-end. You can capture data to the Palm. Once you get the text entered, it is digital data, and you can use it in an integrated fashion -- in your PDA if you're mobile, or on your PC if you need to get it into desktop applications like word processing or mailing lists.

And if you're an email addict, with the OmniSky modem and wireless service you can send and receive email from anywhere. What more reason do you need?

Part 2 >>