I have this kind of feeling that, at least in terms of PDA functionality in ‘smart phones’, part of the problem is that two somewhat disparate functionalities are being pushed together in one device.

Cell phone: you make phone calls, you receive phone calls. This is something most people do all the time, and all a cell phone does is let you do it anywhere. This is probably why they’ve become so ubiquitous – everyone needs to use the phone, and hopefully cellies/mobiles/whatever your fun word for them just enable that. Making a phone call isn’t rocket science – you dial a number. On a landline, you just pick up the handset and dial it; on a cell, you need to push the green button.

PDA: you get organized – you manage your calendar, to-dos, maybe your email, travel stuff, projects, maybe some office documents. Being organized is something a lot of people probably TRY to do, but a lot of people FAIL at it. I’m really assuming the failure here because if organizing was like talking on the phone, we wouldn’t have Franklin-Covey, David Allen’s GTD, etc.

Thus, I think one hurdle to making things easier for users on cellular phones is the hurdle of making things easier on a phone that aren’t easy in the first place.

Keeping track of maps, your detailed shopping lists, project tracking, using the internet on a 160×220 screen, synergizing your company’s mission paradigm through extensible B2C CRM, these aren’t ‘easy’ things. Expecting people to pick up their phone and magically know how to do it is like expecting them to pick up a PDA and know how to do it. As we’ve seen by the PDA market not being nearly as huge as the ‘it makes a phone call’ cell phone market….

I agree. And speaking of getting organized and such, are you still trying out that My Life Organized software? I have been trying it a little and it’s scaring the life out of me, and taking over my life for that matter – but I have devoted very little (almost none) time to getting to grips with it, so at the moment it is getting to grips with me …

re MLO, I’m not trying it out any longer. I decided to try something called UltraRecall, which is basically what I call a ‘stuff bucket’ program, a personal database. I’m using it for GTD stuff, which seems to work quite well after a lot of poking and fiddling to set it up. It has a few things MLO doesn’t: the ability to have an item linked to more than one location, totally customizable searches, the ability to store all sorts of non-task-related crap.

MLO has a few things UR doesn’t: the ability to sync to a Pocket PC, an interface that is significantly simpler (UR is powerful, but not Big Shiny Button easy by any stretch of the imagination).

UR is kind of a general purpose app that can do what I want. MLO was a specific-purpose app that mostly did what I wanted, but not *quite*, however it was more directly geared towards to-do management.

I have no idea how MLO’s PPC sync stuff works, as I don’t have time to test it out, not being a PPC owner and having limited non-work exposure to PPCs