Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Hi Phil

Welcome to the forum

If you're going the Palm route and you have the finance I would definitely go for the Zire 72 - it's the best value and well give you the longest in-service life given the built in multimedia facilities thus giving students the ability to audio-visually record their work. Also I foresee a large growth in rich media applications being published for these platforms over the next 12 months (hint, hint) A Windows Mobile device with similar spec would be more expensive.

I understand that you're Apple Mac based desktop wise. My experience of Documents to Go has been very poor on the Mac platform. The whole thing feels like a cludge and has wiped the PIM data on my Mac and Treo combination more than once so I'm assuming there's some kind of system mismatch here or an undocumented feature (legal term for 'bug'). Have you considered the Missing Sync from Mark/Space? I'm just starting to use it now.

I'm not even certain that running Word / Excel style apps on Palms are a good idea, have you checked the equivilents from GoKnow? The Docs to Go implementation of Powerpoint on Palm is a hoax by the way!

Hope this helps

Hi,,

I use a Zire 72 myself  and we have 30 out with students.
Problems- the paint comes off! With the ones the students have we've had one actual faulty one which was dead on arrival. (pda not student, though it can be difficult to....)  A few have been dropped but have survived (again I mean the PDAs...)

A few students claim the battery keeps going flat but any Ive looked at have been fine, So I'm still trying to get to the bottom of what is going on.

The Zire 72's ability to play MP3s and the inbuilt camera make the device worth carrying for students who have not yet realised how useful the device can be as an educational tool. On the other hand some schools ban cameras on site so that may be a problem.

DocsToGo I find very useful. More for carrying documents about than editing them, but the interface has been  improved on the version aimed at PalmOS 5 machines.

(Hi Jocelyn, Tunsten W is pre OS 5 so cannot run the most recent docs to go)

and the missing sync is a good product and the company are good for tech support if its needed.