THE FIRST ONE fell off the sofa and broke ... I left the second one on the back seat of a cab ... the third one fell out of my bag and never worked again. So now I am on my fourth PDA, a Handspring, with which I am happy to say I have enjoyed a good relationship for more than a year. It runs the Palm-operating system and was the first Palm OS PDA to offer expansion modules, which are called Springboard Modules. There are Springboard MP3 players, digital cameras and even muscle massagers. But the one Springboard module everyone wanted to lay their hands on was the mobile phone. Plug in this module and your PDA becomes a telephone. Just click on a number in the address book and it dials. These devices not only make calls, they surf the web and send e-mails. There have been countless occasions when I was out on the town and thought, 'Wouldn't it be slick if I could just log onto the web right now?' So when Handspring sent me information on the Treo 270 Comm-unicator, I was keen to buy one.
The 270 is a colour PDA running the Palm-operating system with a GSM mobile phone and GPRS option. GPRS allows you access to the internet at about the same speed as you would through a 56K modem. But the first thing I noticed about the 270 is what is missing. Unlike previous Handsprings, there is no Springboard slot, so there is no muscle massager. Secondly, and more importantly, there is no handwriting recognition. Instead the Treo uses a thumb-sized keyboard. Now a lot of people have come to me for advice about buying a PDA and I have found most first timers are put off by handwriting recognition. They believe it is going to be difficult to learn. In reality it isn't: you just have to remember to write in capitals.
With the Treo you still need the stylus, but many of its on-screen functions, such as speed dial, use big buttons you can push with your fingers. But others are too small so you use the stylus to select items and the thumb keyboard to type. I found this arrangement awkward and complicated. It would have been so much simpler to stick with handwriting recognition. The second negative aspect about the Treo 270 is web surfing. GPRS is fast, but the Treo is just too small a machine to handle images quickly and I was unable to maintain a connection if I moved too far from whatever cell I dialled into. In other words, it is no problem if you want to surf while you walk around the office, but forget about doing it in the back of a cab - you'll lose the connection.
Having said that, the Treo 270 is a slick machine. The screen is clear and legible in the dark although it is difficult to read in direct sunlight. The phone connection is clear - even in a noisy environment - and the software makes it a treat to dial frequently used numbers. While web surfing wasn't exactly all I had hoped it would be, I was amazed at how such a tiny screen produced such a good picture. In the past, hand-helds often omitted graphics and formatted pages awkwardly, but the Treo included most graphics and formatted pages in a legible way considering the unit's small screen.
To summarise, devices such as the Treo are still part of an emerging technology, a fact that is reflected in the 270's $4,900 price tag. If you can look at the Treo and immediately see ways in which you could do every day tasks you would struggle to do accomplish with current equipment, then slap that credit card down. Otherwise, it's best to wait. The Handspring Treo 270 is available from New Vision, Shop 233, Computer Zone, 298 Hennessy Road, Wan Chai.