Trade your paper organizer for new PDA, smart phone

According to folks in the consumer electronics business, the paper-based Day-Timer world is so 20th century.

“There is an enormous mass market appeal for people moving from paper planners to PDAs,” says Jim Christensen, director of product communication for Palm Inc., the Sunnyvale, Calif. company that makes Palm PDAs and Treo smart phones.

At $3 billion, the U.S. smart phone market has eclipsed the country’s paper planner market by $2 billion a year, according to Canalys, an information technology market analysis consultancy based in Reading, England. The U.S. nonphone handheld organizer market is no slouch either at $626 million per year.

You can save yourself time, money and – with paper day planners weighing in at 1 to 3 pounds compared to 3 or 4 ounces for a handheld or smart phone – you can “lighten your organizational load, literally,” Christensen says.

An advantage to going digital is less fear of losing important data since all information can be backed up on a computer or laptop, he says. “With my day planner, if I lose it I’ll never be able to get my calendar back. A Palm replicates without rewriting or photocopying or transcribing every day.”

Another advantage is cost. “The original cost for a day planner is anywhere from $50 to $200, and each year the refill is $20 to $100 depending on the type of planner you have,” Christensen says. Palm’s lowest-end handheld, the Z22, retails for $99. The most expensive Palm Treo smart phone costs $299, depending on your service provider, he said.

Finally, there’s the time-saving factor.

“Say you’re a busy small-business executive,” Christensen suggests. “Every Monday at 10 a.m. you have a staff meeting. You write in Monday 10 a.m., call it a recurring appointment, and it took you 15 seconds. In a paper planner it would take 10 to 15 minutes to write that in 52 times.”

Palm and Hewlett-Packard are among the few manufacturers that offer handhelds that don’t have a built-in cell phone.

The movement toward consolidation of voice and data on the go is being driven by consumer demand, says Jeni Bell, Cingular Wireless marketing director for the Rocky Mountain region. “Historically, we had some solutions for businesspeople. They might have needed e-mail, so we had BlackBerry; if they wanted calendars then they would get the Treo solution. Now we’re getting more ability for text messaging, camera and e-mail.”

Interestingly, Bell says, consumers are demanding e-mail more than business users because they are looking for “one solution and an ability to integrate cool, sometimes complicated functions into one device.”

Cingular’s latest offering is the Samsung BlackJack. The smart phone runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 and has a high-resolution color display, 1.3 megapixel camera that can capture video, MP3 player, QWERTY keyboard, instant messaging, Bluetooth 2.0 and broadband access to the Internet on Cingular’s EDGE network.

Plus, it’s easy to use, Bell says. “My sister, who is at home with two kids and historically the most dedicated Franklin day planner user around, now is using an integrated device. She’ll send me an e-mail to set up lunch and then send me a picture of her baby.”

No matter how many features a smart phone has, people always have a favorite, Bell says. That’s why Cingular considers its devices the equivalent of a Swiss army knife. “When you ask people, ‘What’s your favorite feature of a Swiss Army knife?’ It’s rarely the knife. It’s the scissors or the corkscrew. It’s a phone, but they might prefer texting.”

Charles Ward, president of Qwest Colorado, says his favorite is the slide-out keyboard on his Pocket PC 6700, a smart phone manufactured by UTStarcom that’s available on the Qwest, Verizon and Sprint networks. When he uses it as a telephone, the Pocket PC looks like the familiar “candy bar” phone with a vertical display, but when he slides out the keyboard the display immediately flips the screen to landscape orientation so he can see what’s he’s typing.

Sprint Nextel Corp. offers customers two other kinds of smart phones – Treo and BlackBerry. The newest BlackBerry 8703e, manufactured by Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based Research in Motion Ltd., has all the standard BlackBerry features – phone, e-mail, text messaging, Web browsing, address book, calendar, memo pad, task list, QWERTY keyboard – and GPS.

With a two-year Sprint contract, the 8703e costs $349.99.

“The BlackBerry now can provide some of the tracking and location-based applications that a lot of businesses and individuals like to have,” says Sprint Public and Community Relations Manager Debra Havins. “They are using GPS applications to find pizza places and to make sure their kids are at school.”

The desire for all-in-one devices reflects our mobile society, Havins says. “You can leave work early to pick up a sick child, and you can still have a computer in the palm of your hand” to check e-mail, make a call or sent a text message to work.”

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at 303-440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.

Choosing the right device

Vendors and service providers agree it can be tough for the consumer decide which handheld or smart-phone device to go with. Is voice the most important function? Does it have to play music? Do you feel more comfortable using a touch screen or keyboard?

Although it’s easy to buy these devices online, they agree it’s really important to try them out before settling on one.

And ask questions.

As Rob Collado, general manager of the Boulder Ultimate Electronics store, says, “It’s the job of the retailer to show the customer how to input their most commonly used applications – phone numbers, to-do list, e-mail, texting, calendar. With no training you’ll never use it.”

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