The PDA - personal digital assistant, or "electronic organiser" to take the jargon out and shoot it - has been with us for almost a decade, and models range from the £15 or so glorified pocket calculator to the £400+ device that links to your mobile phone and sends emails all but unaided. They're all very impressive but the question of whether or not they add anything to a business is open to question.
Deciding whether a particular model is suitable for your company is fairly straightforward and will probably involve writing off the £15 model to start with. The reason for this is that if a hand-held organiser is to be any use at all it needs to synchronise with your desktop system, to get around the need for retyping any appointments you might arrange while out of the office. So for any serious business use, the cheapest you're likely to find is around the £40 mark. For this you can get the Touchman organiser from the Innovations catalogue; for your money you'll get a nice-looking organiser in its own docking station, and it'll happily synchronise with your PC using the software that comes with it. The touch-sensitive keyboard looks fiddly but manageable, and for a self-employed person this might be a good fit.
Unless, of course, the self-employed individual wants access to his or her emails while not in the office, in which case it's a bit of a non-starter. For that sort of function you need to raise the game a little and start budgeting for something closer to £100; in fact you might be well advised to do so regardless if you inhabit an office that has any sort of networked diary system. The more expensive PDAs will allow you to synchronise your appointments and contacts not only with the software that comes supplied with them but also with whatever software you have in the office. Most of them, such as the Psion Revo and 3Com's Palm range, come with software that will link into Microsoft Outlook, while Lotus Organiser (current versions at least) have software to link to the Palm. Sidekick will also link to hand-helds, although Time and Chaos synchronisation programs cost extra.
Once you're able to synchronise these programs, the benefits of having an organiser should become fairly apparent. It becomes impossible to lose track of an appointment or contact; an email confirming an engagement is always in your pocket alongside your records of that person's contact details. As long as you remember to take your organiser with you and keep the batteries topped up - an appallingly easy thing to neglect - you're always up to date without devoting any time to it.
Whether this makes you any more productive is unclear, but it can remove a few headaches and save a lot of time printing messages or scrawling them into a diary. Some of the more expensive PDAs come with a modem attached (you can order a modem for most of them as an optional extra anyway); it's therefore simple to send and receive emails while on the road. Most ISPs will support PDAs as a medium by now; even AOL, which tends to use non-standard software for its communications and dial-up internet connection, is planning to expand into the Palm area very shortly.
Not everything about a PDA will help initially, though. Operating the things is intended to be as painless as possible, but try telling that to someone struggling with Graffiti, the handwriting system used by the Palm. You don't actually use handwriting as such, you learn to write letters individually. Once you've got the hang of it, it's a pushover, but there's a learning experience to go through. Competing products prefer to offer a Qwerty keyboard; however, the size of these can also be a disadvantage unless you have extremely long and spindly fingers. There are foldaway keyboards available for the Palm and the Handspring, the most common handwriting-sensitive devices.
The actual payback time for the money spent on a PDA will inevitably vary from customer to customer. If you're primarily office-based and don't need to get out much, then to be honest you might not get much out of the devices at all, and if you're often on the move but not in need of your contacts or email then you won't need one either. If you need to check your own availability often and want to update the office scheduling network with a single button, however - or even if you're a busy sole trader who doesn't want to go mucking about with copying stuff on to your PC for a couple of hours a week, let alone lose half of it in the process - you're likely to find the money very well spent.
