Mobility

In response to Tara’s PDA question.

I agree with Warren: get a Bluetooth-enabled phone, such as the Sony Ericsson T610. It’s excellent.

I use a tiered ‘mobility’ system:

Tier 1 is the base station, which is my G4. I use iCal and Address Book.app on it. All data entry and long-term calendaring /corrections/should be done here. The data stored here should be held as “true”, over all systems.

Tier 2 is the work station, which is my iBook. I use iCal and Address Book.app on it. I do almost all of my data entry here, and clean it up on the base station. The iBook is a mobile workstation, so I can lug it anywhere, change or create stuff, and eventually sync that data with the base station.

Tier 3 is the T610 cellphone. This is the most mobile device, and as such, it should be the smallest of the three devices, so that I can carry with me virtually everywhere. It stores a current copy of my calendar, address book, and notes. It acts as a reminder via its alarm feature. In a crunch, I can add phone numbers to its address book, or appointments to the calendar, and they’ll be synced all the way back to the base station. However, adding these entries is a lot slower than entering them at either Tier 1 or Tier 2. That’s ok because I enter data on this device significantly less frequently than on the other two devices.

Really, there is a deeper layer to this, a Tier 0: an Internet-based storage site. In my case, it would be my .Mac account, which stores the address book and calendar info remotely, where it is accessible from both Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Tier 3 was once a PDA. For a while, it was even my iPod. However, by getting the T610, I could eliminate one device that I had to carry around everywhere.