Steve Meek was asking about PDAs and electronic textbooks. I have been doing some work over the last 7 or 8 months
with PDAs for emergency medicine. The first thing to say is that they are undoubtedly the way forward. The second
thing to say is - not yet.

I started my experimentation with a Psion Revo. That broke twice, blew up a USB hub and went back pretty smartish. It
was not adequate for the task. I then tried an iPAQ with Windows CE. That was a great improvement, but got stolen.

I have now moved on to an iPAQ pocket PC running Windows 2002.

This is easily the best so far, but it is by no means perfect.

Good points. Small, sexy (sad or wot) and with a fantastic clear colour screen. It can be securely protected with a
password at two levels of security. Will synchronise with everything on your desktop PC such as any files, Outlook
(everything; contacts, calendar, tasks, notes etc). It has several different ways of entering information; a block
transcriber (using Graffiti-like recognition, for Palm users here), a tiny virtual keyboard, a letter recogniser and best of all a
handwriting transcriber. This allows you simply to write in a standard cursive fashion on the entire display (it is
touch-sensitive) and it learns your handwriting, so even my scrawl is recognised surprisingly often. It will take a tiny
data card (not included; so far up to 128Mb available) , and various sleeves are available with functions including
WLANs like Bluetooth. It uses a docking cradle to synchronise with the PC, and can also be synchronised over infra-red
connections. Battery life has not been an issue in my hands. It has a pocket copy of internet explorer, and this can be set
up to download items of interest from a free server at http://www.avantgo.com to keep you up to date. There are
promises of electronic versions of journals, but nothing is available yet. I have loaded my entire electronic doctor's
handbook on it except for the video files and there is space still to spare. It will also play mp3 files if you want to have
music while you work; either through its tiny loudspeaker or through a headphone socket. It comes with pocket word
and pocket excel, but not access. There are pocket versions of a powerpoint player http://www.presenter.com and of the
adobe acrobat reader http://www.adobe.com. Slight differences from standard windows ways of working are
required, but it isn't an issue. There is supposedly a version of Symphony, a new UK A&E management system coming,
but I haven't tried it. There are lots of other bits and pieces which are basically toys.

Bad points. It is small and sexy, and hence easily targeted for theft. The software is quite immature, and some bits are
decidedly flaky, especially the synchronisation software which crashes other applications and has resource leaks.
However, I have reported these to Microsoft, and I'm sure they will be fixed. Quite a lot of things aren't properly
implemented or enabled yet; internet explorer spawns acrobat reader correctly, but can't cope with embedded powerpoint
presentations. At £500 a pop these are seriously expensive items - you can get a full-size PC for that. Synchronisation of
large files is reasonably speedy over the USB connection on the cradle, but can be excruciatingly slow over the infra-red
link, which is only enabled to 115kbps, for some reason.

However, I m convinced these things are the future, particularly when fitted with wireless LAN stuff. They are now
powerful enough to be a serious tool.


Best wishes,


Rowley Cottingham

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http://www.emergencyunit.com