My first serious experience with handhelds occurred nearly 10 years ago when I and the rest of the managers in our business unit at Borland International were given electronic organizers, the brand name of which shall remain obscure, to protect the innocent. The devices were advanced for their time, equipped with 256 KB of memory, and featuring appointment book, address book, calculator, and memo applets, as well as the optional capability to back information up onto a PC.

As was typical for such products, the appointment and address books permitted little data flexibility. I seem to recall not being able to store a third phone number for a contact, nor an e-mail address. To some extent, various modern organizer hardware and software suffers from the same types of limitations, forcing users to think within rigidly defined guidelines. Nonetheless, we were all pleased to have the gadgets, and used them with enthusiasm.

Backing up the unit's data, though, was an ordeal. Those of us who purchased the optional cable and software often went for weeks between backup sessions, and even then, backed up data could only be "used" by restoring it onto the unit. When a colleague's unit did a perfect belly-flop onto a ceramic tile floor when he dropped it in a hotel lobby, he lost three weeks of unbacked-up appointments, contact information, and notes. He glumly bought another unit, restored his surviving data, and zealously backed up his organizer at every opportunity thereafter. Having seen pieces of my friend's organizer go skittering in various directions across the floor, I started using a conventional, paper-based organizer and consigned my electronic wonder to a desk drawer.

From time to time in the intervening years, I reexamined the capabilities of new electronic organizers, for despite being flexible to use and drop-proof, paper organizers have their drawbacks. First, they require extra up-front effort in order to easily find information later. Second, needed information invariably migrated from my organizer to the organizer's archive binder. Finally, binders are impractical to back up, which meant that if my book were lost or stolen, a large chunk of valuable information would be lost forever. No electronic gizmo I looked at displayed enough flexibility or horsepower to replace my paper organizer, until a chance visit to an old friend in late 1997 introduced me to the PalmPilot.

I'd looked at earlier PalmPilot models and found them to be lacking: they seemed underpowered and the lack of keyboard put me off. However, my friend's demonstration was compelling. Here was a handheld that offered not only an appointment and address book, but a to-do list, a calculator, an expense applet, a mail program, and a memo capability. Most of the applications offered a level of flexibility that was impressive: you could, for example, attach notes to appointments, address entries, and to-do list items, and the address book featured user-definable fields. Finally, there was a small but growing number of third-party applications that promised expanded capabilities for the unit, including graphics, an RPN calculator (which I prefer to the built-in one), and Web browsing.

After a few minutes spent learning the unit's Graffiti strokes, I realized I did not really miss the "missing" keyboard. And to top it all off, all of the data in the unit could be backed up in less time than it took to format a 3.5-inch floppy, and it could be viewed and edited using a Windows-based application. I was sold.

While I admit having to think hard before shelling out nearly $400 for my PalmPilot, I've never regretted my decision. (By the way, that unit, the Professional model, today sells for a street price of under $200 as 3Com prepares to release new models that offer a variety of improvements.) I plan my day on my Pilot, I read my mail, too. I take meeting notes, I download interesting Web content, I read Russian poetry. I even wrote this column on my PalmPilot.

To be frank, if today there were no hope of getting a replacement, I don't think I'd trade my PalmPilot for a million dollars. In future columns, you'll find out why.

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