My First PDA

I first owned a Palm m515, which I bought in Singapore 3 years ago. At that time, it was the only first PDA with color screen. Although the resolution was only 160x160, it was very much nicer compared to my friend's m505, which was in black-and-white.

I bought the PDA just before I started my housemanship in Kuching. At that time, as I could recall, only a handful of people were using PDA. In fact, many people were still too new to this tech-gadget, and I was honoured to be one of the first few people who actually took time off to introduce this technoogy to my colleagues.

My first PDA, the Palm m515, was only mainly for PIM, alarm clock and reading some ebooks during on call time. There wasn't any medical stuff installed in my PDA at that point of time. Occasionally I would install some simple games to play, but I still prefer (even till today) to play games using the laptop/desktop!

I remember my colleagues were mostly amazed when I pulled out the PDA from my shirt pocket. Some of them never even saw that piece of gadget in their life before, and you could see that "wow!" look on their facial expression! During my pediatric rotation, I find the PDA's calculator function was indeed a must for everyday's ward rounds.

Until one fine day, I met up with a junior from my medical college in KL, he actually "beam"ed me many medical reference texts and softwares into my PDA. From then on, I realise that having some medical references in my PDA is indeed very useful especially during on call time, I can do some simple search for management and treatment, before paging my senior medical officer for further advice! That was the time, I started to search extensively for medical softwares for my Palm; and in fact I also started using the Doc-To-Go to create my "medical notes" (or pearls we call it) for ward use and future reference.

When I left Kuching, some of my friends started investing in PDAs, most of them bought Zire 71 which was a neat and affordable PDA with camera function at that time. I was then smiling to myself thinking "was it me who had actually started off the PDA trend amongst my colleagues back then in Kuching hospital?" Till today, I still don't have the answer, but I guess I don't care anyway. I am still a doctor heavily dependant on my PDA till now...