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A Doctor's Best Friend

As many students and residents have newly purchased PDA's, I thought it would be helpful to provide you with a quick primer on PDA's and their potential uses in medicine—specifically your rotations and clerkships.

The uses of a PDA are almost limitless. A PDA can control your calendar and to-do lists, hold a library of medical information, help manage your patients, manipulate medical data, and allow you to play solitaire when away from home!

PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants come in two main flavors: those using the Palm Operating System (Palm OS) and those using the Pocket PC operating system (Windows CE). Each class has some distinct pros and cons. The vast majority of PDA's (over 85% of those used by MDs) use the Palm OS. For this reason, most of the medical software available (and tested by us) is primarily written for the Palm OS, so we will concentrate on this platform. The chart below highlights the major brand names.

Palm OS Comparison Chart

	Palm m515	Palm Tungsten-T	Handspring Treo 300	Sony CLIE PEG-T665C	Sony CLIE PEG-NX70V
Price (average)	1200Dh	1399Dh	2200Dh	2000Dh	2500Dh
OS	Palm OS 4.1	Palm OS 5.0	Palm OS 4.1H	Palm OS 4.1	Palm OS 5.0
Screen	160x160 high res color	320x320 high res color	160x160 12 bit color	320 x 320 resolution, 65K colors	320 x 480 resolution, 65K colors
Memory	16MB + 4 MB Flash ROM	16	16MB	16Mb internal + Memory stick	16Mb internal + Memory stick
Upgradeable OS	Yes	yes	No	Yes	Yes
IR Port*	Yes	yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Palm Tungsten-T is 4medStudents.com best choice. It is available in Carrefour stores all around UAE with only 1399Dh

Here is a quick tour of some of the freeware and shareware medical programs available for the Palm OS. Each program has a link you can follow to learn more, download or order the software. This list is by no means complete but should offer an idea of what is out there. For those of you unfamiliar with installing software onto your PDA, please see this tutorial written by PDAMD.com.