F
or the road warrior of the 21st century, having the tools to stay connected is a must. Todayis intrepid traveller must equip him or her self with the basic array of gadgets to stay in touch and get work done: a laptop, cell phone, and a PDA. The latter 2 items have become so essential to the harried traveller that business battles have been lost or won for not having these key modern marvels.
Many makers of cell phones and PDAs have attempted to combine both products with varying degrees of success. Cell phone makers tend to offer cell phone-based products with PDA functions added. These devices are useful, but they are sometimes hard to use; either the screen is too small or the applications on the device (calendar, e-mail, etc.) doesnit quite jibe with whatis on your Mac.
PDA makers take the opposite tack; they create a PDA that just happens to have phone features built in. The down side of PDA/phones is that they are often larger than the phone/PDAs, and getting to and using the phone is not as straight forward as it is with a phone/PDA.
Which device you use will largely depend on whatis important to you; size and phone convenience or PDA functions. If the latter is your cup of tea, the folks at Handspring may have just what you are looking for. The Treo 270 from Handspring is a Palm OS based PDA/phone that delivers all of the functions and features of a PDA and cell phone, and has somehow managed to strike a balance between the two devices that should appeal to many. We took a Treo 270 for a test drive and were both somewhat impressed and a bit disappointed with what we found.
That Syncing Feeling
One extremely annoying problem is that Handspring did not include the OS X version of the Palm Desktop and Sync Manager on the included CD. New owners must go to Handspringis Web site and download the software. This annoys us because we can think of no real reason why an OS X version is not included and installing the OS 9 version can cause problems, as weill elucidate in a moment.
If you use OS X and have never used a Palm device, your initial installation of the Palm Desktop and Sync Manager should probably go well. If, however, you have used a Palm device in OS 9 or have previously installed Palm software in either OS 9 or OS X, you may have a bit of a problem.
We ran into a show stopping error that forced us to dig around the Web for answers. We found our answers and were able to get the software installed, but casual Mac users may never find the answer and throw up their hands in resignation.
Trouble in Installation Land |