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Sites @ hand: How to get beyond the basics with your handheld

Let your fingers do the walking through the plethora of commercial Web sites, self-help sites, listservers and newsgroups available to help you make the best use of your PDA.

By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. Sept. 10, 2001.

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So, you think you're pretty hip now that you've gone and bought yourself a handheld. Whoa! You could be way cooler!

If you're like most physicians, you're probably just using the personal information management applications, like the address book, calendar and to-do list. And, perhaps, you regularly download additional software applications from some handheld Web sites. Not bad.

Odds are that you're downloading those applications from one or two sites you discovered or heard about. Nothing wrong with that.

But you could be missing out on some terrific online resources for handheld users. A smorgasbord of sites out there offers various software and information support services that will help you learn how to put your handheld to the best personal and professional use.

Those sites generally break down into four categories, said Jim Thompson, MD, an emergency physician in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. He operates a site devoted to computing centered around the Palm operating system from Palm Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.

"The biggest, most frequently updated and most detailed are commercial Web sites where a company has an interest in selling hardware, software or both," Dr. Thompson said. "As a way of drawing interest to their Web sites, they provide a lot of information and product reviews and so on.

"Of course, all of those are somewhat biased because they have a product to sell."

A second category includes "self-help sites" like his, which aren't updated as often as commercial sites, Dr. Thompson said. "It's just a pure hobby." [...]