Never Owned A PDA? Is It Time To Start?
The PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) has moved from being the toys of super geeks to a useful took for women and women in all jobs and all walks of life. What exactly is a PDA? It's a small, portable electronic device that allows you to do everything from maintain a calendar to connect to the Internet and even play games on. Not only have PDAs changed how we live our lives but the format, style and capabilities of PDAs themselves has also changed. The original PDAs were no more than glorified calculators but allowed people to organize their lives and proved to be hugely popular because of this. They weren't very "pretty" but they got the job done.
Technology, however, has come on in leaps and bounds. The Personal Digital Assistants you can purchase today have a huge range of features. Firstly almost all of them now feature touch screens - you can navigate and control the PDA just by touching the screen itself. You can use your fingers to do this (best not to because you leave greasy fingerprints on the screen). You PDA will come equipped with something called a stylus which is a small device you can use to tap the screen gently instead of using your fingers.
Apart from touch screen technology being introduced there have been other truly visual changes to the world of PDAs. Gone are the awful green/grey LED (light emitting diode) screens from the history of portable computing. New PDAs feature high resolution color screens that offer excellent picture quality across a wide variety of applications.
Audio and video are other areas where PDAs have come an awful long way. Most PDAs (even up to recently) were only capable of playing feeble beeping noises. You'd consider yourself lucky if it could display photographs at low resolution. Modern PDAs have excellent audio and video capabilites - literally. Listening to MP3s or viewing your digital photographs is a snap. If you have a large enough memory capacity you can even use your PDA as a portable move theatre by watching Realmovie format movies on your new toy.
PDA Uses
PDAs aren't just for entertainment purposes however. They're far more powerful than that and are now provided with fully functioning productivity applications such as word-processors, spreadsheets and database applications. These don't have the same power as their desktop variants but offer more than enough functionality for any on-the-go person.
It doesn't just stop with what software you have installed on the PDA itself. There's a whole world that you can connect to. That's right modern PDAs can quite easily connect to wireless broadband networks (also called Wi-Fi) and even be connected to your companies LAN (local area network). This allows you to store files from your PC on the network and even print important documents directly from the PDA itself. The most powerful PDAs offern capabilites just short of that offered by full blown laptops.
The neat thing about all these changes is that they come at very affordable prices. Most people would assume that any electronic device offering the above type of features would cost at least $1,000 or more. Shockingly you can buy yourself a color PDA for less than $200!