Tuesday, September 14, 2004

PDA woes

I love my PDA, my handheld computer. Received it as a gift from my dad several years ago. Well, actually, that was a Visor Edge, and the motherboard failed after a year. At that point I was able to get a hand-me-down Visor Pro, which I was extremely happy about because after three days sans handheld, I was stressing!

Now I'm in a similar but not as tough of situation. The Visor is ignoring the stylus. This started creeping up a couple of weeks ago, but now it's full blown. I can still do data entry in the calendar, addresses, memos, and to-dos on my desktop computer and sync them, but I have to navigate the handheld using the buttons. Time to put a new one on my Christmas list. I wonder what's available out there that's a Palm OS, full featured (no $50 "electronic address books" for me, please!), yet fairly inexpensive. Then, shall I browse eBay? Amazon marketplace? Dunno.

Favorite apps:
1. The native ones (calendar, address book, memos, to-dos)
2. HandyShopper (databases, and I have a TON!)
3. Fitaly letris (popup virtual keyboard)

Any other at-home parents or home-biz owners love their handhelds?

UPDATE: I did some online research, and discovered this is "Mad Digitizer Syndrome"! I downloaded an app that might help, but I also did a hard reset and recalibrated the digitizer. I should've done the hard reset days ago, of course. So far it's not getting weird on me; I hope this is a long-term good thing so I don't pine for a new handheld (any more than usual, anyway!). My favorite amount of money to spend is $0 :)

1 comment:

Donna said...

I, too, love my PDA, but have used it less as I've been stuck to my computer more. That will change now that I'm working at my daughter's school - so I hope mine lasts me longer than yours!

Oh well - the good news is that there are newer, more exciting PDA's out now than when you bought your Visor, and the prices are not too bad (not $0 but not bad and you can even get them at Target - and they are a tax dedcution). Get one with wi-fi and you can even check email if there's a hotspot where you do your shopping (one of our malls has a free hotspot).