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At work, one of my jobs is to help my customers pick the best style of PDA to fit their needs. I begin by asking questions like, “How are you going to use this device primarily? As a phone or as a PDA?” and “Is this primarily for reading email or do you intend on surfing the web and viewing documents?”. By asking these types of questions, I hope to figure out (at least initially) whether a Windows Mobile-based device or a Blackberry based device would be a better fit for them.
Another question that is useful is which mobile carrier they are using… which will tell me how fast their data connection may be and how reliable their service will be in our area.
For the most part, if you are mainly using the PDA for reading email, then the Blackberry will probably be the best fit for you. There are, of course, other factors to consider when making your decision. If you are using this for business, does your company have a Blackberry Enterprise Server so that you can have your email and calendar data pushed directly to your phone? Are you willing to pay the extra cost for the higher caliber data plan to support that endeavor? (even with unlimited data plans, there are different LEVELS of unlimited data… which usually only people in the industry know about)
As some of you may know, there are also two other major players in the PDA arena, namely Palm based devices and the new Mac OS devices (the iPhone). I tend to advise against Palm based devices these days, mainly because they tend to be more painful to configure properly to have email pushed to them from our servers. The same goes for the iPhones, I tend not to recommend those for business purposes, since they are not supported by our PDA servers. That being said, I have seen the iPhone and was very impressed. When they DO finally have support from Microsoft and Novell, I will have no qualms about condoning their use in our environment.
Lastly, I would like to hear from you regarding your favorite devices and what experience you have had with them. Please leave a comment with your own PDA experiences.