Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. Thus said Francis Bacon when Shakespeare was still alive, and play-pirates were geniuses who could memorize a three-hour script at one hearing, and reproduce it verbatim. Times have changed. We memorize much less, and we have much more information to deal with. As the world has increasingly become smaller, we have come face to face with larger number of people and have been exposed to larger number of events. Our lives have become busier with a thousand things to do – pay the electricity bill, ensure proper insurance premium in time, ensure regular Provident Fund payments, pay the income tax, remember wife’s birthday and the wedding anniversary, remember son’s Sunday football match…This is where the organizer comes in. Earlier, the organizer was a diary with separate sections for different errands. The PDA, or the Personal Digital Assistant, is the digital equivalent of it.

The term PDA was first coined in 1992 at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas. PDAs (or palmtops) are handheld devices that were originally designed as personal organizers, but became much more versatile over the years. A basic PDA usually includes date book, address book, task list, memo pad, clock, and calculator software. Many PDAs can now access the Internet via Wi-Fi, cellular or Wide-Area Networks (WANs) or Bluetooth technology. A successful application of miniaturization of computing technology, the PDAs are more intelligent than many mainframes of yesteryears, and have their own operating systems, like Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian OS, etc. Today, many cell-phones combine the PDA features along with the regular phone features, making them a complete communication package.

In this section of the webdirectory, we provide links to many products and vendors, and other resources related to Personal Digital Assistants.