Palmtop PCs Grow Up

The first personal digital assistants--with their tiny screens, balky keyboards, and poor handwriting recognition--flunked usability tests. But we give higher grades to the latest palmtops and handheld PCs. Here's the skinny on which PDAs will help organize your business day.

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How to Avoid That Syncing Feeling

No matter how much you love your PDA, your ardor will cool quickly if you can't easily transfer your information to and from your PC. Not all PDAs sync with all personal information managers, however.

For example, until recently Windows CE 2.0 devices couldn't be synchronized with ACT 4.0 (which has been available since early spring). You may also encounter problems stemming from disparate data fields in your PDA and desktop PC software. Windows CE devices, for instance, mimic Microsoft Outlook in setting aside a special field for events or appointments on your calendar. Because Lotus Organizer has no such field, the location information in a Windows CE PDA will not sync with this PIM. So make sure a PDA supports your PIM--with or without the help of additional software--before you buy it, and be prepared to devote some time and energy to setting everything up.

Syncing Windows CE devices over a serial cable, we ran into an annoying bug on PCs that use dial-up networking to connect to the Internet: When we tried to initiate synchronization, the Windows CE desktop app ignored the direct cable hookup and tried to establish a dial-up connection to the Internet. You can disable automatic Internet connection in your browser, but that can be inconvenient.

--Yardena Arar