SHOPPING FOR TOYS

Dick Pountain/Mon 17 February 2003/12:19 pm/Idealog 103

I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the PDA market since my column about my 'Airport Test' and I've most certainly withdrawn myself from the cool toys race, by dumping my unloved Palm V to buy a cheap-and-cheerful M100. It's served me well: the unfashionably rounded 'Fisher Price' shape feels good in the hand, and its cover flap works better in the pocket than any leather case I've tried (once you've Araldited it in place that is). Last summer I was motorbiking over the potholes of Tottenham Court Road when the Palm fell from an outer pocket into the middle of the road and broke into seven different pieces (batteries included). In a surprising fit of sentimentality I pulled over and, during a rare gap in the traffic, picked them all up. They all snapped back together, and on reinserting the batteries it not only worked but the contents were intact. Your anodised aluminium may look sexy, but ABS plastic is the only stuff for the real world.

Recently however a new project has finally forced me to seek a PDA with more memory. I'm editing a selected works of a once-famous American evolutionist, and the first step is to read, and makes notes on, all his books. Obviously I want computer assistance in managing all this data, and after a lot of thought I chose to use the outline feature of Excel rather than a proper database. Each book title occupies a row, with its chapters as folded-away subheadings, and all the publisher data, page counts and so forth go in as the columns. This way I can enter the starting and ending page number for each selection and have Excel keep a running total word count, and thus juggle selections to hit the publisher's target size. However it's going to take months to read all the books and I really don't want to have to sit in front of my computer all day reading them, but would like to take notes wherever I happen to be, on the sofa, in the garden or the park. That's a job for PDA Man. I could have just taken notes in the Palm Memo Pad and then manually stuffed them into Excel, but that aggravates my obsessive-neurotic streak which insists on keeping data in just one place so that it's always in sync and backed-up.

I've been a registered Documents To Go user for years, so I initially hoped that I could actually carry around and edit the spreadsheet directly on my Palm. It turned out I could just squeeze the sheet into my 2 Meg M100 if I uninstalled the Word to Go portion, but that left no room for it to grow so a bigger PDA was obviously needed. There were other problems too. Editing a 13-column spreadsheet on the tiny screen was a royal PITA, only slightly helped by turning off automatic recalculation and freezing the unwanted columns. Then there was the question of where to put the notes. I tried putting them in separate, linked, worksheets (too messy); in Comments (readable but not editable on the PDA); and typing them directly into cells with word-wrap. The final deal-breakers however were discovering that while Docs To Go on the Palm can expand Excel outlines, it doesn't seem to be able to collapse them again - and that desktop Excel regards simply opening and collapsing an outline as editing it, thus generating huge amounts of spurious Hotsync traffic. 

Then Derek Cohen our esteemed publishing director showed me the latest version of Natara's Bonsai outliner running on his Tungsten T. Bonsai's user interface is just about ideal (better even than GrandView of blessed memory) and it looks exactly the same on Windows as it does on the Palm. I was hooked, and I'll leave writing a macro or script to suck the notes out of my Bonsai outline and into Excel till the end of the reading stage. So I downloaded and registered a copy of Bonsai and started looking for a new PDA to run it on.

How the market has changed since I looked away! Far from being the winner it once was, the iPaq is now universally reviled (it's even driven Jon H back to his Filofax) and Palm's gorgeous Tungsten T is the new lust object. I was able, with some difficulty, to resist the lure of T because of its rechargeable battery: my dodgy Palm V experience has stopped me trusting them for ever. That narrowed the field more than somewhat, to just two machines, Palm's M105 and Sony's CLIE SL10. I plumped for the latter because it has a card slot, but buying one turned out to be a thoroughly post-modern experience in that every shop in Tottenham Court Road had sold out because 'there's no demand'.

In the end I ordered one from Dabs, along with a whopping 128MB Memory Stick, and I'd have to say that with Bonsai assigned to the Memo hardware button the CLIE makes the perfect note-taking machine. Its high-resolution monochrome screen looks great with medium-sized fonts and the Jog Dial has rapidly become indispensible for one-handed navigation. I've plenty of room in the card for a good English/Italian dictionary plus several other reference books (which use barely 20MB), and a neat utility backs-up RAM contents to the card. My only worry now is that by the time I lose or break the CLIE, AAA-batteried PDAs may have become extinct altogether: maybe I should buy another.