Why use a PDA in 2024
March 18, 2024
A PDA, short for Personal Digital Assistant, is a small handheld computer that contains personal information such as one’s calendar, email and contact list, to aid the owner in their day-to-day activities. Paired with a mobile phone over Bluetooth to provide it with network access on the go, this is a powerful electronic ecosystem to have. Or at least, to be had, some fifteen years ago.
A Palm TX, my last PDA
The Palm TX above was my second Palm device (after using the m130 for several years) and I used it until around 2010. I remember the Palm TX above was in fact my second Palm (after the m130) and I used it until around 2010. I remember the calendar app being the best I've ever used to this day. Connected to my amplifier over a 3.5mm cable it played Internet radio channels via old badly-secured WiFi and there were lots of games.">calendar app being the best I’ve ever used, to this day. Connected to my amplifier over a 3.5 mm cable, it played Internet radio channels via old badly secured Wi-Fi and there were numerous games.
Smartphones made these devices utterly useless, of course, their big advantage being that they are, in fact, a combination of a PDA and a cell phone in one device. The big downside, however, is that they are, in fact, a combination of a PDA and a cell phone in one device. Having everything on one device makes everybody stare at their phones all the time. Just the other day, I saw a three-year-old kid learning how to ride his tricycle with his dad behind him fixed on his phone’s screen.
Honestly, I would love to go back to the old situation, where phones were just phones that had a few extra functions such as an FM radio or a podcast player. Where a mobile phone was merely a luxury and nobody required you to own one. Yesterday I received an email from my bank, stating that, starting two weeks from now, I’d be needing their Android app to log into their banking site. They said not having to distribute identifier devices was more sustainable, which is nonsense, of course. Their Android app requires a recent version of Google Play Services. That means, considering how long most smartphones receive updates, that this bank requires all their customers to throw away a smartphone every few years.
I don’t have the numbers, but I doubt that’s more sustainable, or you’ll assume people will do that anyway. Their identifier devices last far longer. I know of several people who don’t own smartphones, all younger than I am. If even banks start to marginalize them, what’s the end of it? Our government uses an app for identification on public websites, such as health care insurance and taxes. What’s next? Are we going to vote for parliament, identifying ourselves with an Android or iOS app?
But I digress.
A Sharp QZ-770
Before there were Palm PDAs, I had one of these. The Sharp QZ-770 was like a mini laptop. The screen had just four gray scales and was certainly no touch screen, but there was an actual keyboard that was small but pretty nice to type on. The QZ-770 came with a serial cable that connected to my PC, so I could install apps on it that I had downloaded onto my PC. There was even a BASIC interpreter, so I could write my own apps on the device itself, which I used to do on the go. I wrote apps on the bus, while waiting for the bus, during lectures and even at home. It was that convenient. That is something I have never done with my Palm PDAs, and only once on Android, just to see how it was. Needless to say, I don’t recommend it.
The smartphone form factor is simply not suitable for text based content creation. Yes, you can enter text, but text editing is horrible. Trying to get a cursor at an exact position costs just too much time and effort. You need to use pinch-to-zoom, and frequently the UI thinks you’re panning or selecting text. Bluetooth keyboards barely improve on this because user interfaces expect people to use the touch screen.
A Pine64 Pinephone with a Pinephone Keyboard
Enter my modern solution to the problem. What you see here is a Pinephone, a phone that didn’t come with Android (or iOS for that matter), connected to a Pinephone keyboard. Since the phone weighs more than the keyboard, Pine64, the maker of both, simply put a big battery under the keyboard for balance. I installed PostmarketOS on the phone, which is an Alpine-based Linux distribution for smartphones. The window manager is Sway, which is a keyboard focused tiling window manager, in the picture above showing two windows side-by-side running Neofetch on the left and htop on the right. One of my main use cases for this device is to allow me to do server maintenance on the go without having to bring a laptop.
Last summer, I wrote an essay and edited chapters of a book manuscript on this device. Obviously, there’s no touch typing on this keyboard or even using most fingers, but the keys have a good amount of travel, so typing felt good, and I didn’t have to think about it. Case in point: I’m writing this post on my PDA.
LibreOffice is unusable on a small screen like that, and I don’t like word processors anyway. I used Lyx, which is a front-end for Latex, when I was working on the manuscript. Recently, I started typing in my Latex using vim because the result is cleaner, and I have more control over lay-out. The point is, whatever tool I choose, these were made for keyboard input. Screen real estate is at a premium, of course, so the fewer of it is taken up by menus, ribbons and status bars, the better. And I found out terminal apps are generally better at that. As a bonus, an uncluttered screen allows for more focus.
I am working on a rather technical post that will detail how I set everything up, so you can decide if it’s something you’d want to use.