.KEYWORD managelife
.FLYINGHEAD PDA PERSPECTIVES
.TITLE How PDAs will help us manage our lives
.OTHER
.SUMMARY As the handheld market expands and prices fall, Personal Digital Assistants are becoming available to a much wider audience. In this fascinating commentary, technology strategist Jason Thibeault looks at how PDAs are moving out of the office and into the home to help us manage the business of our lives.
.AUTHOR Jason Thibeault
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.H1 About this article
From time to time, we like to get an outside expert’s perspective of the handheld market. It’s also a good idea to occasionally put ourselves in the shoes of the people who aren’t eating and breathing Palm products on a daily basis. Jason Thibeault is a freelance technology strategist who’s given the growth of the PDA considerable thought. What follows are some of his ideas.
.END_SIDEBAR
At some point in the past year, the handheld market exploded.
Kaboom! PDAs everywhere. It was like some World War II movie except all the shrapnel has been replaced by the glowing iridescence of backlit PDAs. Or maybe, instead of a World War II movie, the explosion was just a proliferation of products and advertisements. Over the past twelve months, at least 50 percent of the circulars in my Sunday paper seemed to feature a PDA advertisement. And the ads weren’t limited to just the powerhouses like Palm and Pocket PC or the retail giants like Best Buy and Circuit City. A host of other devices (like DaVinci and Rex) and sellers (like Wal-Mart and Target) joined the fray.
.CALLOUT We begin to blur the line between personal data and business data…our reminder to get milk is given the same priority as finishing the presentation for tomorrow’s sales meeting.
As those other devices and retailers have helped saturate a once polarized market, the prices have begun to fall. A Palm m100 can be purchased for little more than $100, and an HP Jornada 525 goes for around $300.
.H1 Handheld for the common man
What the saturation of the handheld market and the subsequent drop in price means is that the handheld has suddenly become available to a much wider audience — soccer moms and school kids, grandparents and baby-sitters. And the marketing agencies have gone after them. In a recent Sears circular, it isn’t just the astute businessman or businesswoman standing next to the PDAs, it’s a friendly couple-an average man and woman.
Whether it was the market pricing that caused it or the pervasiveness of the devices, one thing is clear about the Sears circular and the message it sends: the PDA is evolving into a device to help us (all of us) manage the daily business of our lives.
When you think about it, such a concept makes sense. Our lives are filled with a growing amount of data: friends and family contact information, things we need to do, times we need to be somewhere. Up until now, people used little scraps of paper or, in the case of those "Type A" personalities, a paper planner, to keep themselves organized. To me, it seems like, until recently, PDAs have been typically embraced primarily by business users.
.H1 Taking your work home with you
That need to manage the data of our lives didn’t just take control of our psyche overnight. It has been successfully cultivated over the past decade by the behaviors we exhibit at work. As we return home from our jobs with our PDAs in our briefcases, sometimes mounted to the air-vents in our cars, always on–we begin to blur the line between personal data and business data. Our work contacts are mixed with our friends’ phone numbers, our reminder to get milk is given the same priority as finishing the presentation for tomorrow’s sales meeting.
No wonder the line between our personal data and our business data is blurring when so many companies require their employees to purchase their own PDAs. When we’re forced to purchase (or we’re given, if you work for a more enlightened company) our own devices to use at work, we feel even more obligated to use it as much as possible, to cross boundaries. So we have it on the coffee table when we return from work. We wield our styli at the dinner table and in front of the TV. And our spouses watch. And our kids watch.
And as the styli fly across the tiny screen, making the gentle tapping sound acquired only through experienced use, there’s discussion about how the PDA can keep us all better organized, about how husband and wife or mother and daughter can beam information to each other, whether it be important dates or contact information.
Suddenly, everyone in the family wants one.
We each want one for our own reasons, but ultimately for one shared dream: managing the data of our lives.
.H1 Life data
And with this growing extension of office behavior into the home come the applications. Even as I write this, software vendors are dreaming up new programs to help people manage all the data in their personal lives, store it, retrieve it, organize it, and yes, even analyze it.
One such company, Keyoe, Inc (at http://www.keyoe.com) even professes in their tagline, "Software to enhance and organize your life." Their primary product, Diet and Exercise Assistant, is designed to help body-conscious people track everything they eat (including calorie intake, fat intake, etc.) against their exercise regimen and their weight.
The result is a well-laid plan for losing a certain amount of weight by a certain time (even with graphs). It’s the analysis of our "life data."
This application is the ultimate in personal data management. We organize and manage the very food we consume to function as biological organisms. Perhaps it is, like the paper planner in the beginning, a little anal. But it’s exciting to see such a program developed because it epitomizes the profound shift in existence of the PDA within our culture and society (and it’s cool).
It’s not hard to imagine Diet and Exercise Assistant on my boss’s PDA. Nor is it hard to imagine that at lunch he’d be tapping away at the screen, logging all his food and drink so that he could better analyze his weight-loss goals.
Diet and Exercise Assistant empowers a PDA for our lives (where business and personal have become synonymous with "managing data"). Of course there are a number of other "calorie intake" applications as well as "exercise-tracking" applications. This shift in the PDA will generate a new host of competitors.
.H1 Applications for home and body
There are a number of other interesting personal information management applications that are just beginning to garner attention. Here’s a sampling of of some interesting applications I found.
.H2 HandyShopper
HandyShopper (at http://palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?sid=16950720010625124544&prodID=5314) manages shopping lists of all types, from groceries to DVDs. It’s pictured in Figure A.
.FIG A Manage your shopping lists with HandyShopper.
.H2 AllMoney 1.06
AllMoney 1.06 (at http://www.iambic.com/pilot/allmoney/default.htm), much as the name implies, allows you to manage all of your personal financial information. It’s pictured in Figure B.
.FIG B AllMoney manages your personal financial information.
.H2 Auto Slate 1.5
Auto Slate 1.5 (at http://standalone.com/palmos/auto_slate/) is for those people who need to watch mileage or gas consumption, or for those who like to keep track of all their maintenance. This application provides all of that. It’s pictured in Figure C.
.FIG C Monitor your mileage with Auto Slate.
.H2 Contraction Timer 2.10
You can find Contraction Timer 2.10 at http://members.fortunecity.com/judebert/palm/palm.html. If you visit this site, though, beware the full-on assault of pop-up ads! You have been warned.
But what about Contraction Timer? Well, it doesn’t get any more personal than this. It’s an application to help manage contractions for expectant families. It calculates how far apart and how long the contractions are, it lets you take notes, and it keeps a log you can scroll through. It’s pictured in Figure D.
.FIG D Keep track of those contractions with Contraction Timer.
.H2 Woman 3.05
Woman 3.05 (at http://www.beiks.com/palmzonebg/woman.htm) allows a woman to keep track of her menstrual cycle. It’s pictured in Figure E.
.FIG E Woman 3.05 tracks women’s menstrual cycles.
.H2 4T Medical 1.3
4T Medical 1.3 (at http://www.fortsoft.com/4t_medical.htm) keeps track of all medical information (such as doctors, allergies, insurance, etc.). It’s pictured in Figure F.
.FIG F 4T Medical 1.3 tracks medical information.
And these are but a sampling of the programs currently being developed. Yet they represent well enough the growing trend of developers creating applications to help people manage their lives.
.H1 What’s next?
Thinking about this more personal shift in PDA usage leaves some questions unanswered, such as "Where will it all go?" and "When, if ever, will it stop?" Will applications be developed to manage when our children leave the house (combined with wireless, location-based services)? A "home-management" company called Xanboo (at http://www.xanboo.com) has developed hardware (cameras, sensors, etc.) to let us manage our homes from the Internet (from the desk at work). And, of course, they’ve tied it into the PDA, allowing the Xanboo user with a wireless PDA to get notified of events on their Xanboo system (like a door opening or a motion sensor being triggered).
Is this where it will stop? Or will application developers create PDA programs to help us manage the food in our refrigerators and pantries? The electricity usage each month? Our brain-wave patterns?
Perhaps the behavior we exhibit in the workplace–the ever important need to manage data and information–is itself a manifestation of something larger: the pervasiveness of the PC (and personal computing in general).
Our reliance upon computing to carry out many of the tasks we take for granted (such as the proper operation of our cars and the processing of our credit cards at the grocery store) indicates our acceptance that much if not all of our lives can be reduced to data. Of course we may not like to imagine that scenario (that we’re all just a bunch of ones and zeros), but we can’t ignore the fact that computers have a very interesting way of "digitizing" our lives.
Take this article for instance. The thoughts in my head–fluctuations in chemical levels, firing of neurons, the translation of biological workings into words and ideas–are transformed by this computer into something binary, forever digital.
It’s no wonder that the PDA is moving from the business world into the home world. With our countless PCs, we have already laid the foundation for computing devices to help us manage the growing conversion of sensory perception and thought into data.
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It may sound like something out of Dune author Frank Herbert’s imagination, but, in actuality, it’s a good thing. As PDAs become more pervasive in the home and at our schools, everyone will become a little more organized, a little more capable of dealing with the information flow of life in a logical and coherent manner. This is especially important for our children, who will face a far greater and richer information flow than we have.
And, hey, who knows
