I continue to struggle with devices.... I know they don't manage me, and they don't own me, but they have an awful weight on my time....

I'm bouncing these days between my old and creaky Nokia 6600, which is serviceable and multitasks, crashes only rarely, but doesn't do much in the way of input (T9 is better than a kick in the head, but not a whole lot better...), has a small screen for display purposes, has trouble keeping signal these days, and has no category support for tasks (critical to a reasonable eGTD implementation).

The Treo has a better keyboard, handles categories natively in the calendar (and transfers them from the desktop with reasonable acumen, thanks to Mark/Space's Missing Sync 5.x. But as blogged previously, it is just increasingly unstable, so untrustworthy (and trust, as all GTD readers will recall, is integral to having a system which works and which works with you). Add to this that some of the stability issues will necessarily be exacerbated by weird workarounds to provide quasi multitasking (think MultiFinder on MacOS way back in the day, or the joys that were serial port conflicts on IIfx machines), and I'm reluctant to pull it out (though I still did so tonight, devoting a couple hours to cleanup, upgrade and restoration).

I spent a little time looking at some of the current Windows Mobile 5 devices - Palm has one, HTC makes them in bulk for most of the telcos now in the US. They look a bit better in the abstract - a variety of keyboard and form factors, multitasking built in, more connectivity options. But it's still looking very windowsy - why use 2 taps when you could impose six instead? There's a lack of sync availability for OSX, unsurprisingly, though the Mark/Space engineers are working on it still. And it feels... well, it feels clunky and like a compromise.

Maybe I need to hold out for a while longer between my limping devices. April 1 would be a great time for the Steve to converge devices, though I admit that is a long bet at least (and a foolish one, though that hasn't stopped me in the past).

Or, as mon frere Mike has pointed out, paper does nicely (but paper isn't email on the go, though AZ may appreciate the silence). Certainly letting one's self become distracted by these overtly over-wealthed world issues is absurd.

Posted by esinclai at February 22, 2006 10:23 PM |