The PDA Guerilla: Taking note(s)

I am just back from a week in >Boston at the 11th annual Drug Discovery Technology & Development conference put on by IBC Life Sciences (www.IBCLifeSciences.com) of Westborough, Mass., and London, in the Boston World Trade Center and Seaport Hotel. And of course my Palm T3 played a major role in my week. However not everything went as planned.

By the way, the World Trade Center is an excellent small conference facility. A repurposed commercial wharf, it has been rebuilt inside for comfort and functionality with plenty of electric outlets, a good cafeteria, a friendly staff, and a fine view of Boston harbor.

On the road everything is about batteries, and the T3 is famous for its short battery life. I find the stock battery lasts about three hours of continuous operation, with the screen backlight at minimum illumination. At home this seldom causes problems; when the battery warning comes on I just take a break while the T3 recharges on its cradle. Things aren't quite that easy on the road. I have one Palm Power To Go external battery left of the three I once owned (one wore out, and the second dropped out of my pocket on the San Diego trolley last February and disappeared). That gave me just enough power to get through each day's note taking, with little margin for things like e-mail. In retrospect I could have put my external charger in a coat pocket every morning and recharged my T3 during breaks, but since I was driving into the show every day, instead I kept my laptop in the trunk and got it out every morning and evening to do my e-mail, using the Center's free WiFi network.

My Palm, however, has always been my primary note-taking device on the road. While my laptop has two hours of power, my Palm with its external battery can go all day. I can use it both sitting down with a keyboard or standing, writing on the screen, which I cannot do with the laptop. It also is much easier to carry. Three days of lugging my laptop around a conference vendor floor leaves my arms and shoulders aching. The PDA and keyboard fit in my jacket pockets.

That usually is a highly satisfactory solution. However, it turned out to be suboptimal last week. The rather strange problem I encountered was repeating keystrokes and other seemingly random actions that happened while I was typing at full speed (80+ words per minute), trying to get as complete a set of notes as I could on the presentations. The worst single incident happened Tuesday afternoon, when more than a page of notes disappeared for no apparent reason as I was typing. At other times a phrase I had just typed would duplicate on its own. These frequent duplications have filled my notes with garbage that I now have to edit out before I can start writing my articles.

I was using a Palm Universal (infrared) Keyboard which I have owned for two years but seldom used because I usually prefer to hand enter my text in the T3 using the Fitaly Virtual keyboard. That is how I write my blog, for instance. But for note taking, 10-finger typing is much faster. For years I used the Stowaway Portable Keyboard from ThinkOutside (www.thinkoutside.com) for note taking in my Palm and loved it, but I finally wore the keyboard out. Frankly, I have not found an adequate replacement since.

Since I only see these random problems when using the Palm infrared keyboard, I presume something about it, possibly something in the driver, is causing the problem. The keyboard is also very fragile. My first infrared keyboard lasted a week, and the tip of the infrared arm broke off rather mysteriously since I had not mistreated it. Its two  supposed advantages over the original Stowaway are that it can be used with virtually any PDA with an infrared port, and it can be used in your lap without a flat support under it. However, it is so flimsy that it is likely to slide off your lap and break on the floor.

The T3 itself performed flawlessly in all the other tasks I put it to during the trip. I drove the nine-hours to Boston from my home in Virginia to save money (this trip came out of my pocket). To keep from going crazy during those long drives, I listened to recorded books downloaded into my PDA from Audible.com (www.audible.com). I ran my T3 off a Radio Shack car charger, and it worked perfectly. I do also have an iPod, but I keep my Audible files on an SD card in my PDA partly for the extra control the T3 provides and partly because I prefer to use the 20 Gbytes in my iPod to hold at least part of my music collection.

So now I am searching for the perfect PDA keyboard. I will report on what I find in future installments.