Date: April 6th, 2004

Presenter: Ray Ferber

Topic: PocketPC's, PDA's and More: Making Choices

Meeting Summary:

If you live and work in an environment where it is necessary to carry information around with you, or for which you need a more convenient planning and scheduling alternative than a conventional dayplanner book, you may need to consider some sort of palmtop computer, PDA, or similar device. However, which kind of unit meets all your needs? Ray Ferber had to make these sorts of decisions, and he agreed to tell us about the things he learned along the way....

Ray gave a very interesting presentation, comparing the various sorts of hand-held computers which were available to him in the course of his odyssey towards the ideal pocket computing solution -- a quest he no doubt will continue as the technology evolves.

His job with First Data Resources, by whose IT department he is employed, requires him to have a convenient source of reference material, contact information and countless other sorts of data available to him wherever he goes, both at work and on the road. In addition, he needs to be able to synchronize his portable device with his desktop systems at home and at work.

At various times, Ray has purchased and used various models, including PocketPC's, Palm PDA's and so forth, sever of which he brought to the meeting.

Although it is not possible to detail his entire presentation here, we do have for your inspection a PDF version of his slideshow file:

Ray's presentation was very interesting, as evidenced by the lively flow of questions from those attending, and hopefully we will hear from him again in the future on this or other topics....