Moving on

Ain't nothin' like having a colleague drop his PDA in Zouk and immediately losin' all his information --- and he didn't get round to backing it up on his laptop in near six months! --- done made me high-tail it to Funan Centre and immediately procure me a new PDA.

Wow, I am watching too much Firefly. Back to English.

While my current PDA (a Sony Clie T665 in a very nice bright orange) is still serving me well, the battery's near the end of its lifespan and a full charge lasts barely two days, even with my brand of minimal usage: calendaring, keeping track of daily expenses, checking phone numbers and occasionally updating address book data, editing a memo or two or using the calculator. Far more disturbing is the fact that the hold button is either loose or faulty, because there have been too many occasions when I flick the device on, only to find that the battery's somehow drained itself dry and I have to rush the Clie back home to recharge it before all the information is lost.

Of course, losing information wouldn't be such a critical fear if I backed it up regularly, which I used to do when I was using a PC. Since I switched to the iBook, though, here lies the conundrum: Palm no longer has desktop software that's compatible with my two-year-old Clie, and the software that came packaged with the Clie was for the Windows platform only. And my old PC died within a month after I acquired the iBook, so I couldn't've used it purely as a backup device, even if I'd wanted to.

Needless to say, for the last six months or more, I've been taking extremely good care of my Clie since I have no way of backing up its data. Other interim measures: charging the Clie every other day, manually entering some address book entries from the Clie into the iBook, and keeping an eye on the local Palm website for new products and deals.

Ultimately, it took the little calamity at Zouk to move me to action. No point dwelling on the fact that I'd just missed all the deals that were fit to offer at Comex. I marched right down to Funan Centre today and picked up a Tungsten E2, bundled with a case, screen protector and 256MB SD card.

Everyone should shop at Edpol Systems (#04-23) because the guy running the store is friendly, helpful, chatty and totally doesn't pressure a customer into buying anything. He's also honed the application of a screen protector down to a fine art and helpfully made me a copy of Palm Desktop software for the Mac because that (still) doesn't come prepackaged with the PDA. He even told me to bring my Clie in with the new E2 if I have any trouble transferring the data over, and said he'd take care of it. Of course, the paranoid corner of my brain immediately retorted, "A-ha! But he might copy your data and use it for all sorts of foul deeds, and next thing you know, you'll be hauled up for crimes you did not commit!" But I think that's just the science fiction talking.

Speaking of transferring data, it's been about the requisite three hours since the E2 started charging, so it should be fully charged now and ready for action. Here goes...

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