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PDAs

PDA is short for "Personal Digital Assistant". It's a handheld device that can combine computing duties such as telephone / fax numbers, Internet connection and networking features. Recent PDA devices have also included the ability to function as a mobile phone, fax machine, world wide web browser and a personal organiser. The Psion company was the first to release a PDA with a pen-based navigation system, this has now become the standard for any PDA. Due to the size of PDAs they cannot incorporate a keyboard into the design. One problem with pen based navigation has been the effectiveness of the handwriting recognition. Recent PDAs have even been able to react to voice input by voice recognition technologies. Of course both recognition technologies can be troublesome at times, but the indications are that they are improving with time.

Most PDAs are not compatible with Apple Macs. They usually only support Microsoft Windows, because the operating system the vast majority of PDAs come with is Windows Mobile.

The prices of PDAs can be as little as £70.00 to over £500.00.

Features to look for include memory flash card capabilities, internal battery, infra red communication, Bluetooth, WiFi 802.11g, display resolution of 480x640, CPU speed of around 624 MHz and memory RAM of around 64 Mb.