High-tech holiday where world is in your pocket

By COLIN MOORE

There will come a time, insist the earnest young boffins, when no one will leave home without their PDA. It will make all travel bookings, order their meals, call home and help confused travellers to find the way back to their hotel in strange cities.

For the uninitiated, a PDA is a personal digital assistant, and if the smart young things are right, you are going to hear a lot more about them.

They come in two sizes - handheld, the size of a paperback book, and palmheld, about the size of a modern mobile phone.

The trend all began with the PC - connect a PC to a telephone link and you have access to e-mail and the worldwide web. Trouble is, your average PC is a bit heavy to lug around and probably will not fit in an aircraft overhead locker.

That problem was solved with the advent of laptops. They now have the grunt of many PCs, even though some will fit in your briefcase with plenty of room to spare. I have seen bored businesspeople sitting at airports playing games on their laptops or working away feverishly.

But I doubt you would find anyone fishing a laptop out of their briefcase to check an appointment time, read a street map or make a note to ring home. And, as the batteries drain in a few hours, you won't find laptops on the trekking trails in Nepal.

So while they're great machines for businesspeople, students and journalists, they're still too big to be a useful travel tool.

That's where PDAs come in. The idea probably started with pocket calculators, then came digital diaries and a host of similar-sized gadgets for translating foreign words or checking your travel expenses. Because of the way their software is embedded in the circuitry, rather than on a moving hard disc, these devices all run on very little power.

While I had never felt the desire to own an electronic diary or personal organiser, the total computerisation of journalism creates some problems. When writing on the run I need to be able to transfer my efforts to a computer, without having to transcribe or input the material again when I get home. Handhelds seem to provide the answer.

But just how useful are these devices? Are they simply expensive toys for computer nerds? Certainly the nerds get very excited by the technology and its potential. In theory travellers can put a palm-sized PDA in their pocket and leave maps, diaries, guidebooks and so on at home.

You can download several novels into a pocket PC and read them by scrolling the screen. It can store your travel music, maps and accommodation listings. Click in a small camera lens and you can take pictures and download them. Another accessory will allow it to act as a mobile phone.

Lost? Press another button and a global positioning satellite accessory will show you where you are on a map and how to get to where you want to go.

You can make a dinner reservation, book an airline ticket or see what beds are available for the night in the next town.

But are palm-sized PCs genuinely useful and what are problems they solve?

I spent the whole of a wet Sunday afternoon downloading map software off the web before deciding that a city street map, available free at any airport or hotel concierge in world and shoved in my back pocket, would be more useful than a map on a PDA screen. Likewise, I think I'll stick to taking my leisure reading in a paperback rather than on a PDA screen.

I have written two feature-length stories on a HP Jornada Pocket PC using the near full-sized collapsible keyboard. I found it much easier to use than my handheld PC with Windows CE 2.0 software (see sidebar).

The pocket PC and collapsible keyboard together are smaller than my handheld, but only marginally, and it is an indication of where the market is seen to lie that the CE 3.0 version of pocket word does not include a spell checker - it's not intended you should write a novel with it.

But talk to someone like Ed Armstrong, technical development manager for Casio in New Zealand, and you'll get a different perspective.

You shouldn't use a PDA to "reproduce paper," he says. You really would be better off with a map in your back pocket.

But if you want to find an address, you just type it into your PDA, loaded with the appropriate software, and the relevant map will appear on the screen along with instructions on how to get to the address you want. That saves you having to search through a whole street directory.

"To get the best out of a PDA you have to use it to go some steps further than you can go with paper," he says.

He cites the example of a restaurant using pocket-size PCs to take orders as doing no more than reproducing paper. What they could do is reproduce a colour picture of a particular dish before an order is confirmed so a customer can see whether the dish looks as good as it sounds.