The trouble with high-tech gadgets ...

Arnawa Widagda, Contributor, Jakarta

If you're a close follower of IT trends, you probably have one or more of these little wonders of technology: gadgets such as MP3 players, PDAs, cellular phones, smart phones, gaming handhelds and countless other "information appliances".

While they promise to make life more fun and easier, they can easily get out of hand.

Advances in technology and design allow the packing of increasingly more features into these gadgets. Smartphones are a good example; they are essentially both PDA and phone in one package.

Other cell phones now offer multimedia features such as a digital camera for videos and stills, video and audio playback and even the AM/FM radio. PDA manufacturers have also followed this trend. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are becoming standard features on PDAs.

Unfortunately, more is not always better. Sure, having these features is nice, but have you noticed that as more features are added, battery life becomes shorter? We are still using the same old Lithium battery technology to power these devices, and new advances such as fuel cell batteries are still a long way off.

Usage-wise, users have complained these little devices are becoming increasingly difficult to use. Even long time device manufacturers like PalmOne and Sony have been criticized by users and industry experts alike for their designs.

Ironically, having these "information appliances" makes managing information more difficult. If you are an average tech worker or IT manager, you probably have a cellular phone, a PDA and of course a PC, either a desktop or a notebook, and you keep them all in sync. You have probably also learned the hard way that this is a lot of work.

First of all, you need a connection for all your gadgets, usually a data cable/cradle or wireless connection such as infra- red or Bluetooth. Second, you need to install the bundled applications and configure them so they will sync with each other. These things are easier said than done.

While PDAs always come with a data cable or cradle, your cell phone may not. So you have to use either a third party cable or infra-red/Bluetooth. Third-party cables may be difficult to find or expensive, and manufacturers often have different implementations of Bluetooth.

Infra-red is slow but it is more dependable and more standardized, but synching through infra-red can take a lot of time, something you don't want to do daily.

Luckily, installing applications on your PC and PDA is quite easy. But configuring them to sync with your personal info manager (PIM) application, not to mention your e-mail client, is not.

For all intents and purposes, when you update something such as a contact or an e-mail, you want it to be synchronized with all your devices, and that is not always the case. If you receive an e-mail on your phone, it may not be synchronized to your PDA and PC unless you are using an IMAP account.

Likewise, if you update your contacts, on which device should you update it? Your phone holds less contact info, while the PDA and PC hold the most info, so it makes sense to update it on either one of them.

If you only have your PDA and cell phone with you and need to update lots of contacts, synchronizing them can take a long time without using third party applications on your PDA, which of course means additional cost.

So, before you go out and buy that next piece of "indispensable" technology, think hard about what you want out of your gadgets, or even if you need them at all.

Yes, they can help you manage your work and life in general, but they also come with a price, and often a steep learning curve. These caveats are likely to apply for some time, so be prepared.