You're comparing apples and oranges. Shepard flew suborbital; Gagarin orbited the earth. It's a huge difference. Getting to altitude is less than half the problem -- once you're at altitude, you still need to get to orbital speed, roughly 25,000 Km/hr. When Shepard was at apogee, his downrange speed was negligible compared to orbital speed.
Why hassle people over their personal choices of how they manage their personal information? I happen to carry a high-end PDA (CLIE NX class), and I am able to manage things very well with it. But I'm a live and let live kind of guy. If you want to run your life out of your cell phone, that's your business. The fact remains that there is a statistically significant class of people for whom a {PDA|cell phone|laptop|Day-Timer|secretary|backpack} makes sense as a solution for staying organized.
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You're comparing apples and oranges. Shepard flew suborbital; Gagarin orbited the earth. It's a huge difference. Getting to altitude is less than half the problem -- once you're at altitude, you still need to get to orbital speed, roughly 25,000 Km/hr. When Shepard was at apogee, his downrange speed was negligible compared to orbital speed.
Why hassle people over their personal choices of how they manage their personal information? I happen to carry a high-end PDA (CLIE NX class), and I am able to manage things very well with it. But I'm a live and let live kind of guy. If you want to run your life out of your cell phone, that's your business. The fact remains that there is a statistically significant class of people for whom a {PDA|cell phone|laptop|Day-Timer|secretary|backpack} makes sense as a solution for staying organized.