High-End Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)

Apple Computer's Newton was the first personal digital assistant (PDA) to make headlines, but since then a slew of others have come along. PDAs are principally useful for businesspeople who travel frequently and who need to do mobile communicating and other on-the-road tasks. Prices new range from around $400 up to more than $ 1 600, de­pending on the amount of memory installed and the kind of wire less services ordered. (Older versions may be found at discount for as little as $200.) Many have pen-based input only.

One experienced computer journalist, Phillip Robinson of the San Jose Mercury News, divides PDA tasks into three main categories: (1) delivering information (as a reference source), (2) communicating information (faxes and e-mail in and out), and (3) handling information (accepting your input and organizing it). "Any PC or Mac can do all three, if you add the right software and training," he says. "No PDA can." This is because—being the size of a video­tape cassette or smaller—they don't have the processing power or the software options.

Most PDAs depend on pen input, although a few have miniature keyboards. All run on AA or AAA batteries or on their own special battery packs. Beyond that, general fea­tures of high-end PDAs are as follows:

1. All PDAs contain an address book.

2. PDAs also contain a calendar or appointment man­ager for scheduling appointments. Most have alarms that will signal you before a scheduled event.

3. PDAs usually contain spreadsheet programs or make them available.

4. Probably the most important feature: All high-end PDAs have a communications link. Some are wireless; others provide a cable modem, so that you can exchange electronic mail and faxes, connect with in­formation services such as America Online, get news and weather reports, and so on. Be sure there's a connectivity kit (usually a cable and a software program) that will work with your Macintosh or PC. It's a lot easier, for example, to type your address lists on a full-size keyboard, then transfer them to your PDA.

Windows

As we introduce the Windows environment, it's worth expanding on what we said in Chapter 2 about how windows differ from Windows. A window (lowercase "w") is a portion of the video display area dedicated to some specified purpose. An operating system (or operating environment) can display several windows on a computer screen, each showing a different applications program, such as word processing and spreadsheets. However, Windows (capital "W") is something else. Windows is an operating environ­ment made by Microsoft that lays a graphical user interface shell around the MS-DOS or PC-DOS operating system. Like Mac OS, Windows contains win­dows, which can display multiple applications.

Note: It's important to realize that Windows 3.X ("3.X" represents versions 3.0, 3.1, and 3.11) is different from Windows 95 (discussed shortly), which is not just an operating environment but a true operating system.

Microsoft's Windows 3.X is designed to run on IBM-style microcomputers with Intel microprocessors—the '386 and '486 chips. Earlier versions of Win­dows could not make full use of '386 and '486 chips, but later versions can. To effectively use Windows 3.X, one should have a reasonably powerful microcomputer system. This would include a '386 microprocessor or better, much more main memory than is required for DOS (a minimum of 4 megabytes), and a hard-disk drive

Microsoft released Windows 3.0 (the first really useful version) in May 1990 and promoted it as a way for frustrated DOS users not to have to switch to more user-friendly operating systems, such as Macintosh. Indeed, Win­dows has about 80% of the Macintosh features. Although Windows is far easier to use than DOS, its earlier versions have not been as easy to use as the Mac operating system. This is because Windows sat atop the 11-year-old command-driven DOS operating system, which required certain compro­mises on ease of use. Indeed, the system had something of a split personal­ity. In handling files, for example, after passing through the Macintosh-style display of icons the user had to deal with the DOS file structures beneath. In addition, many users complained that installing peripherals, such as a hard-disk drive, was somewhat difficult with DOS and Windows.

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