Do People Really Use Their PDAs?

TAL asks: "With Dell entering the market with their new PDA, the PDA market appears saturated. I work in a high-tech industry and I see more people carrying their PDAs than actually using them. At the same time, I see many people actually going back to their paper planners. I've ran the PDA gauntlet myself and have found that much time is wasted syncing, charging and reinstalling the software. Have there been any studies on PDA turnover? I think the PDA has become more of a status symbol than a useful tool."

Comments

I agree...

[wumarkus420]

When I first got my Palm, people marveled at the chance to look at all the phone numbers I could store at one time. I even kept it in my pocket at all times and tried to incorporate it into my wallet (pretty tedious with the original Palm). However, within a couple months, I was only using it to play Galax. I eventually gave it away to my girlfriend, who also used it for a week or two before deciding it really wasn't worth it to have this giant thing for the purpose of only storing phone numbers and playing the occaisonal game.

So then I get a CE device from work. I thought I would give PDA's another chance. While this time, I had color and ethernet, and a decent media player, it fell prey to the same problems at before. I stopped using it within a month and it now sits in a drawer never to be used again.

I think PDA's are cool, but no matter how much I want to like them, they just aren't useful.

I agree

[n__0]

Seems people are trying ot find reasons to use their pdas once theyve got them. Realising they aren't as useful or as easy to use as they thought. My dad picked up one a few months ago and a lot of the price of the ipaq that he got seems to come in afterwards with memory expansions and interfacing wires etc. He doesn't need to interface it to everything, it jsut seems he needs to justify why hes got it and having gps and camera photos on their is really a status symbol.

Need too much discipline.

[monadicIO]

I found that I needed to be too disciplined to use my PDA for tasks that I'd use it for like todo lists and phone,contacts. I got a free one sometime ago. I tried using it but found I was spending more time trying to organise my life in the PDA. I gave up shortly finding that it was more convenient to forget things than to spend time and energy inputting every thing in the PDA.

Now if only I had a personal human analog assistant inputting everything into my digital one.

You said it yourself

[ektor]

I work in a high-tech industry and I see more people carrying their PDAs than actually using them.

If people carry them is because they use them. Sure, you can carry some gadget for a week for its novelty factor but if you don't use it sooner than later you will stop taking it with you.

Having said that PDAs are not for everybody. Unless you spend certain amount of time away from you desk and in need of contact information, scheduling or some specific application maybe a PDA is not for you.

Personally I love my XDA especially because I have my email always updated anywhere I go. I don't use it as a phone very often but when I do it works very well although certainly not as well as a normal cell phone.

Not to knock PocketPC, but...

[dachshund]

So then I get a CE device from work. I thought I would give PDA's another chance

On top of that, the PocketPC devices-- despite being way more powerful and generally cooler-- are much less suited to the basic tasks of a PDA (storing numbers, calendar, etc.) They're just too big, eat too much battery, and the software isn't as concise as Palm's.

I really thought my shiny iPaq would be a great replacement for my Palm and my laptop, with it's ability to handle an 802.11 card (and Ricochet back when that existed). Turned out that it was an enormous and inferior substitute for both, and it crashed a lot with the network card in. Now I don't use either, because I'm dissatisfied with the inflexibility of my Palm and the flaws of the PocketPC.