My first PDA was a PalmPilot Personal, one of the first units to have 3COM silk-screened on the front. I’d have rather purchased a Newton OS 2.0 device, but at the time a used MP130 still cost more than a new Palm.
My story is probably similar to many of those who purchased PDAs and eventually abandoned them. I wanted to use the Palm at work, replacing a 5×9 spiral notebook and Post-It notes on my monitor. Notepad and Tasks, not Scheduling and Contacts.
It was love for a little while.
The BrainForest outliner was great for some of the information I needed to create and carry, such as talking points for presentations and training sessions. AvantGo let me keep up with my favorite news sources on smoke breaks. I had some reference “eBooks” (AportisDoc files) and tons of Notes.
But I immediately gave up on data entry. I learned to write fast enough in Graffiti but it required too much concentration for real-time use. I quickly switched back to 5×9 notebooks for meetings, migrating the important bits to Outlook and my whiteboard when appropriate. As other co-workers picked up Palms I noticed that they were frequently interupting the flow of meetings to finish entering a short Note or Task.
Eventually I stopped “needing” to always have the Palm on me. I kept it near because the Notepad application had lots of important but infrequently need information. Otherwise, imposed organization hadn’t worked well for me — the big view of unstructured information on a notebook and whiteboard suited my habbits much better than structured data on a miniscule LCD.
I resurrected that Palm when I moved to Germany. My hectic travel schedule produced a lot of idle time, turning AvantGo into a real Killer App (desktop RSS aggregators weren’t on the radar yet). I upgraded to a Palm Vx LE mostly to carry more AvantGo channels with me. I tried a bunch of geeky accessories, and even used IR to my cell phone to post some weblog entries from trains, but none of those uses lasted.
When my travel schedule calmed down, the new Palm joined the old one in the junk drawer.
