PDA Women / Palm Handhelds vs. Paper Planners
by Jake Jacobs
We Palm computer users all have shared this same experience at one time or another: trying to convince a friend or acquaintance of the advantages of using a Palm handheld instead of a paper address book and paper calendar. We've heard all the excuses for avoiding the inevitable: "I don¹t want to learn Graffiti" or "It's too hard to use" or even "I can¹t do without my paper planner" and so on. I've written this article as ammunition for helping you convince the 'Palmaphobes' you know to join those of us who have already seen the light.
As dedicated Palm users, sharing with others just how useful our handhelds are to us is quite natural and fun. To help your efforts to convince others of a Palm handheld's usefulness, I've compiled several reasons why I believe Palm handhelds beat paper planners. If these examples don¹t convince your friends, then they're prime candidates to buy that old typewriter you've stashed in the attic.
Palm Advantage 1: The Find Feature -- One of the major motivations for using a Palm handheld is the Find feature. Let's say you're looking for the phone number of a guy you met at a party who told you he was a venture capitalist, but you forgot his name. Right now you could use the services of a venture capitalist to fund your new startup. How do you find his entry in your paper address book? You start at the beginning and scan each and every page, looking for the words "venture capitalist." Maybe you'll find it or perhaps you'll miss it on the first pass. This is a tedious process.
Compare the manual scan method to the ease of tapping the 'Find' icon and entering the word "venture" upon which you will be whisked to a small list in your Palm address book application that includes his entry. Tap his name in the list and you'll be placed right into his contact entry. And if your venture capitalist acquaintance had his own Palm handheld at the party, he might have already magically beamed his business card directly into your Palm, saving you the effort of writing the information yourself. Yet another advantage of Palm over paper.
Now imagine you're trying to find the date of your cousin's upcoming wedding in New Jersey. With a paper planner's calendar you must manually rummage through each page from today forward until you locate the wedding entry. With the Palm handheld the Find function comes to the rescue once again. Tap 'Find' and enter the word "wedding" and ... well, you get the idea!
Palm Advantage 2: Less to Lose -- What if you lose your paper address book? Unless you've made a copy to keep in a safe place, you're out of luck. Just hope that a good Samaritan finds and returns it. Besides, how exactly does one find the time to copy a paper planner? Just imagine standing in front of a photocopier, making copies of each and every page of your planner; we're talking hours of manual labor! Even if copying your planner manually was something you'd consider, how often would you do it? Maybe every quarter? Certainly not weekly!
Now, compare this scenario to the loss of your Palm handheld. Sure, you've lost your Palm; but you can buy a new Palm handheld at a computer or department store, plus you have an excuse to upgrade to the latest model. Of course you haven¹t lost your data, since a copy is saved on your computer's Palm Desktop application. Just set your syncing preferences to 'Computer overrides Palm', HotSync and you're back in business!
Palm Advantage 3: Multiple Alarms -- Another area where paper planners can't touch a Palm handheld is the multiple alarm feature of the built-in Date Book. Not even the most sophisticated electronic wristwatch has as many simultaneously pending alarms as does a Palm handheld. You can have hundreds of alarms set with multiple alarm tones. But as for a paper planner, I've yet to see one with any alarm at all!
Palm Advantage 4: Rescheduling -- Rescheduling an event in a paper planner is problematic at best. It's even worse if you write your entries in ink! With a paper planner, you must first cross out or erase the old entry and totally rewrite it on another line or page in your date book... if there's still any space on the page that is. I suppose you could use a sticky note and pray it won't fall out.
With the Palm, rescheduling is a snap -- or tap!. Select the entry, tap 'Details', tap 'Date' and select the new date, or tap 'Time' and select a new time. You're done, with no messy eraser dust all over your clothes.
Palm Advantage 5: Repeating Events -- What about repeating events such as monthly meetings, annual birthdays or anniversaries, and weekly chores? Again, a Palm handheld beats a paper planner repeatedly (pun intended). With a paper planner, you must buy a new book or refill and spend hours copying all the birthdays, anniversaries, and next year's entries into the new book. Don't you have better things to do with your time? :-)
With the Palm repeated events are simple. Select the entry, tap 'Details', tap 'Repeat' and select the repeat schedule: Day, Week, Month or Year. Further, the Palm handheld is able to distinguish between and query you whether you want the fourth Thursday or the last Thursday of the month -- as is the case with U.S. Thanksgiving Day, for example.
Palm Advantage 6: Categories -- The ability to place Address book entries into categories is another advantage of Palm over paper. Yes, you could partition your paper planner's address book into 15 smaller address books, each with its own category, but that would make looking up a contact entry very tedious, especially if you had forgotten the category in which you had placed it.
With the Palm, you can place any item into one of 15 categories and scroll within one category only. But you can always select 'All' categories to look for an entry. The global Find searches all categories regardless, so you can have the best of both worlds.
Palm Advantage 7: Other Built-in Applications -- So far we've discussed only the Date Book and Address Book applications and these two applications alone could easily justify switching to a Palm handheld. But look at the many other built-in applications: a calculator, a Memo Pad with room for thousands of notes and lists, and a To Do application with priorities and deadlines. How about email? You can jot down an email to anyone, anywhere, and it's sent during your next HotSync.
Palm Advantage 8: Third Party Applications -- Then there is the ultimate advantage: the ability to add over 50,000 third party applications! From MS Word and Excel compatible applications to a multitude of games you can readily customize your Palm handheld just the way you want. Score: Palm handheld 50,000: paper planner 0.
Palm vs. Paper: A Summary -- Here's a summary list of the advantages a Palm handheld has over paper planners:
General
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* Global search capabilities
* Beam items to other Palm devices
* Protection against loss with HotSync backup
* Calculator
* Thousands of third party applications
Date Book
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* Search for keywords
* View schedule overlaps
* Set multiple alarms
* Easy to enter repeated events
* Easy to reschedule events
* Beam your business card to friends and colleagues
Address Book
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* Search for keywords
* Lookup feature
* Multiple categories
To Do
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* Maintain multiple to do lists in one place
* Easy to reprioritize
* Multiple categories
Memo Pad
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* Replaces many pieces of paper and sticky notes
* Paste documents, email, web pages into memo pad via desktop
* Write documents in the field and transfer to PC or vice versa
* Multiple categories
Conclusion -- I fail to understand how anyone would want to continue using a paper planner after seeing a Palm handheld in action. I hope these advantages I've shared will help you demonstrate to your 'Palmaphobe' friends how beneficial a Palm handheld can be compared to a paper planner.
Editor's Note: -- Jake Jacobs is a retired electrical engineer and part-time flight instructor who has used a Palm handheld since 1997 and enjoys writing in his spare time. Thanks Jake for your excellent insights in the Palm vs. Paper Planner issue! -- Mike
Originally appeared in Palm Tipsheet 20, July 2001.