To Our Readers

By John Flanagan

Saturday, August 28, 1999

Bionic brains
fit in a pocket

I dropped my Palm Pilot computer on the concrete floor of my garage and bashed its little brain out.

This happened almost two years ago. I'd already become so reliant on my six-ounce, battery-powered "personal digital assistant" that my wife no longer called it my "pocket protector" and had begun to refer to it as my "Alzheimers protector."

Yes, it's nerdy to carry around a little computer, but I'm beginning to see them everywhere. As an "early adopter," I used to be the only computer-enabled person at a meeting. When time came to schedule something, they'd pull out their calendars and I'd flip open my Palm.

Last year, I went to a meeting of eight volunteers and staffers at Aloha United Way. Six had Palm computers, one had a DayTimer and one had nothing -- me! Of course, I'd forgotten my Alz-heimers protector at home.

The expression "I see you have a new toy" is encoded in the human genome. When we see a mouse, we all say "Eeek!" When we see a new computer, we say "I see you have a new toy."

My "toy" has 790 address book entries and 30 months of date book appointments, eight games and a stack of memos and to-do lists. I can clip on its modem and download e-mail or even access Internet pages.

The Palm's charm is elegant simplicity. Memo Pad, its word processing program, uses 22 kilobytes of memory. By comparison, Microsoft Word for PCs uses 5,204 kilobytes, 237 times as much.

I used to connect the Palm to my laptop with a wire to synchronize and back up the information stored in it, which is important because of the concrete floor danger mentioned above.

My new model uses a wireless, infrared connection to beam data back and forth -- elegant and simple.

They're tough, too. I picked mine up off the concrete, reseated its memory card, synchronized it with my PC and was back in business. Nice toy.

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John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.