New PDA

As the holiday season draws to a close – it is time to plan the upgrade of my PDA.

At the moment I have a Dell Axim X51v PDA and a Blackberry Curve for email & telephone – and until now I have always had a separate PDA and phone as I have never found a phone with the capability of a high end PDA – until now.

PDA History

Over the years I have had a number of PDAs.

  • Ÿ Psion Series 3
  • Ÿ Psion Series 3A
  • Ÿ Psion 5
  • Ÿ The original Palm Pilot – with 2 MB memory upgrade from TRG
  • Ÿ TRG Pro Palm – with CF card slot, I had a 32 MB CF card and a CF wifi card for it, clip on modem and a full sized remote keyboard
  • Ÿ Palm Tungsten – I got probably the best folding keyboard with this PDA
  • Ÿ HP Jornada WinCE – worse PDA I ever had
  • Ÿ Dell Axim X30 – with wifi but only wep encryption
  • Ÿ Dell Axim X51v – first one – this suffered a major memory failure so I bought the current Dell Axim X51v. I bought a second Dell X51v as I had invested in several sets of dedicated leads and accessories for the unit, and although it had failed I did not want to waste that investment.
  • Ÿ The phone I had before my Blackberry was an MDA Compact from T-Mobile running Windows Mobile – but it had many short comings (however it is still in my desk as a spare unit).

The new phone / PDA combo I am looking at is a HTC Touch Pro (for the spec see www.htc.com) – it looks almost perfect for my needs, combining all the things I want in a single package. I will get the largest SD card I can for it and a spare battery but as it uses regular mini USB cables for charging and syncing, no more expense on dedicated cables and chargers. The last folding, full size keyboard I bought was bluetooth, so I am hoping that will work with the new handheld.

I am going to buy it (and insure it) sim and contract free. I have had really bad service from our telecoms supplier here in Lincoln, they even messed up my Blackberry contract, having promised it was a fair deal following a previous “mistake”. No names at the moment as I am looking into the options of reporting them for miss selling.

The plan is to but this sometime around the end of November – hopfully the prices will drop a little by then.