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iPod as PDA?

April 27, 2005 › Sandy McMurray | comment

Can an iPod serve double duty as a Personal Digital Assitant (PDA)? That's what I'm going to find out in the next few weeks. I just picked up a 20 gig Apple iPod. Great, but, compared to my svelte iPod Shuffle, it's off-diet Oprah next to Calista Flockhart. When I'm out and about, I carry my cellphone, my Moleskine notebook, sometimes my Tungsten C PDA and, now, perhaps my new iPod. Time to put my belt on Jenny Craig. But how?

A Marriage of Silicon and Paper
I think I can replace my PDA with the iPod and the Moleskine. Apart from storing music and files, the iPod can also store dates, notes and contacts. I've already installed Pod2Go, software on my Mac. The program allows me to transfer my Stickies, iCal appointments and To Dos and text from files and websites I select into the iPod. So far, so good. But, the iPod has no capacity for text entry.

So, in a meeting, I'll check my iPod to see it a proposed date conflicts and then note it in my Moleskine and update iCal when I get home. That's the theory, anyway.

I'll also try out PocketMac, a cross-platform application that will let me transfer contacts, calendar items notes etc from Microsoft's Entourage (though, with Apple's new operating system, Tiger, coming at the end of the week, I'm thinking of weaning myself off of Microsoft products).

I'll report back to headquarters. If anyone is using their iPod as a PDA let me know your experience.

April 27, 2005 › Sandy McMurray | comment on this item