Don't get too comfy with your laptop. Smaller personal digital assistants, or PDAs, in several shapes and sizes, are making an entrance in the meeting planning arena. They all bring boundless portability to your data tasks.

The Palm

Handheld devices using the Palm OS are now offered by 3com, IBM, and Handspring, among others. It is a comparatively low-tech device, typically with low processing speed, low memory, and monochromatic resolution. Even with these limitations, Palm OS products offer meeting planners useful assistance. EventCentric (www.eventcentric.com) and TeamTech (www.teamtech.com) can replace many paper-based products and procedures such as registration forms, programs, exhibit product directories, message centers, exhibit floor plans, daily show news, lead retrieval, and local area information. This information can be beamed (passed from another Palm OS device via infrared light) at meetings or downloaded from a Web site.

The Pocket PC

Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Casio, and others now offer devices powered by Microsoft's Pocket PC software. These devices are a significant step up from the Palm OS. Typically, Pocket PC devices are faster, have more memory and better resolution, and the screens are usually in color. They provide simplified versions of many popular applications as well as many multimedia options, such as MP3 media files. Although the Pocket PC is more powerful than the Palm OS, there are trade-offs. Pocket PC devices are thicker, heavier, and have a much shorter battery life. They're also twice as expensive.

An emerging player in the field, OpenGrid (www.opengrid.com), provides portable products for Palm OS and PocketPC devices, and for wireless application protocol — enabled (WAP-enabled) phones. One product has a real-time polling device, two-way wireless messaging using an Outlook Express — type interface, and similar paper-replacing features to those of EventCentric and TeamTech.

The WAP-enabled Phone

The challenge facing Palm OS and Pocket PC device users and manufacturers is that not many people are carrying them — fewer than 25 percent in many business settings — limiting the ability to network and communicate to a large group.

This is not the case with cellphones. What WAP-enabled phones or cellular phones lack with their small, low-resolution screens and very limited inputting capability, they make up for in ubiquity. They are increasingly capable of data transmission, text, and instant messaging.

Senada (www.senada.com) and SeeUThere.com (www.seeuthere.com), for example, have products that allow cellphones to be used to set up meeting invitations, send them wirelessly, allow invitees to RSVP using their cellphones, choose their menu selections, and send text comments back.

The Future

The near future will undoubtedly see the merging of cellphones and PDAs. In perhaps three to four years, third-generation, or 3G, wireless phone products will make all these products seem so last-century. These “cellphones on steroids” will have high-bandwidth Internet access at several times the rate of current telephone modems. Two-way video conference calls will likely become as easy — and probably as cheap — to make as today's telephone calls.

And that's just a start. Geo-positioning and worldwide accessibility, among many other features, have the potential to transform the world we live in. Who knows? The impact of 3G's could be as powerful as the Internet or the invention of the PC.

Corbin Ball, CMP, is a speaker, consultant, and writer focusing on events and meetings technology. With 20 years' experience running international citywide technology meetings, he helps clients worldwide use technology to save time and improve productivity. Contact him at www.corbinball.com.