I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one on the planet being driven crazy by what I call the “hand-held dilemma”: trying to decide whether to fill my pockets with five different devices that perform various functions very nicely, or consolidate them into one “übergadget” that does everything in a tolerable, but nevertheless sub-optimal fashion. When I walk down the street here in New York City, I don’t see any evidence of the angst that I suffer; people smile as they walk along with their tell-tale white iPod earplugs; they giggle and laugh as they chat on their cell phones; and they transmit billions of text messages, instant messages, and e-mails while sitting in airports or riding on buses. So maybe it’s just me …

Until a few months ago, I carried five separate devices in my pocket … well, actually, in two or three or four pockets, depending on what I was wearing. I had a Motorola RAZR phone, an iPod, a Blackberry, a Palm Tungsten C, and a compact Nikon digital camera (Coolpix SC7 at the moment). Each of these devices does one or two things really well, and the product name alone is enough for you to know what’s what. However, each of these devices also does one, or two, or three other things — and the capability is there, whether you want it or not.

Every one of the devices, for example, is happy to display the date and time for me, and they’re all slightly different from one another, as well as being slightly different from the clock on my desktop computer, the wristwatch I’m wearing, and the large digital-display clock on my desk. And in general, the devices let me set the time-zone and indicate whether daylight-savings time should be turned on or off; this hardly ever matters, except for the occasions that the date/time gets stored as part of the metadata associated with a digital photograph.

More significantly, my iPod not only plays music exceptionally well, it can also store calendar events (uploaded from Apple’s iCal) and name/address contact information (from Apple’s Address program). It also has a few minor functions, such as games and an alarm, and it can even be used as an external hard disk; but I’ll ignore those functions for the sake of this discussion. But you can’t use it to send email messages, and it won’t take pictures, and you can’t make calls with it (at least, not yet: the rumor mill is once again predicting that Apple will release its own iPhone in 2007).

Meanwhile, my Blackberry does a terrific job of sending and receiving traditional e-mail messages, and SMS text messages; but you can also equip it to function as a mobile phone, and it can also store calendar events and name/address information (though synchronizing that with my Mac desktop is beyond my ability, since the shareware program provided by RIM crashes every time I try using it). It also has the ability to create and store memos and notes, as well as to-do items; but it doesn’t play music, and it doesn’t take pictures.

My Motorola RAZR is theoretically capable of playing music, but probably can’t store many songs; in any case, it’s not compatible with Apple’s iTunes, so I haven’t even bothered investigating the details. Obviously, it does make phone calls; and it does support email and text-messaging. It has a limited ability to store calendar events and name-address information, and it has a mediocre camera, with resolution almost ten times lower than my Nikon digital camera.

The Nikon camera, on the other hand, does only one thing: it takes pictures. Maybe it plays games and maybe it has an alarm clock; but it sure doesn’t make phone calls, and I can’t use it to store calendar events or name-address information (though, as noted above, I can use it to tell today’s date and time). I can’t use it to send email or text messages per se, but it does have a WiFi capability, so if I can find an open network, I can upload or email photographs directly from the camera.

What have I forgotten? Oh, yes: the Palm Pilot Tungsten C. It has the best keyboard of all my hand-held devices (of course, the camera and the iPod have nothing even vaguely resembling a keyboard). It does a terrific job of displaying my calendar events, contact list, memos, notes, and to-do items; and I can synchronize all of this effortlessly with my desktop computer. I can display and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents on it (not that I ever have, but it’s nice to know that I could do so, if the need ever arose). It has an excellent email program, a good Web browser, and a reasonably user-friendly mechanism for connecting to WiFi networks. I’m told that it can play music, but if you’ve got an iPod, why bother?

The annoying thing is that I can’t avoid the redundancy; there’s no way to buy one of these devices with the unwanted features stripped out, which means that — directly, or indirectly — I’m paying for features I don’t want. Far worse, I’m sometimes forced to use the redundant features. For example, I’ve got detailed contact information (including work address, home address, several phone numbers, and multiple email addresses) for some 9,000 individuals on my Palm Pilot; and it’s the most likely of my handheld devices to be accurate and up-to-date, because I “synch” it regularly with the “master” copy of that data, which resides on my desktop computer. But since the Palm Pilot only connects to the Internet if I’m in range of a Wifi network, it’s not my primary e-mail device. That’s what the BlackBerry is for … but to avoid manual re-entry of email addresses every time I compose a new message, I’ve entered about 100 of my most commonly-used email address into the BlackBerry’s address book. And inevitably, I end up with situations where the BlackBerry doesn’t have quite the same information as the Palm Pilot…

The obvious solution to this collection of independent devices appeared on the scene in 2002, in the form of the Palm Treo 300 … which was then updated to the 600 ; then the 650; then the 700w (for Windows users) and the 700p (for Palm users); and then the 680; and now (according to the Internet rumor mill) the 750, but only for European customers. In any case, it combines a phone, Palm Pilot, camera, email device, Web browser, and (in theory) a digital music player. The Treo 300, in my humble opinion, was unusable; the 600 was barely tolerable; but the 650 was a pretty good device. As soon as the 700 was announced, I began lusting for it — but I didn’t want the 700w, because (by definition), it’s intended to support Windows Mobile and Windows XP, rather than the PalmOS-MacOS synchronization that I’ve been using. Even worse, my telecom carrier (T-Mobile) never supported the 700; for that matter, they never supported the 650, either, so I simply bought an “unlocked” Treo from Palm, and plugged in my T-Mobile SIM card, and prayed that it would work.

The Treo 650 contains, by definition, the full functionality of a Palm Pilot; so I could leave my Tungsten C at home. It’s got its own built-in camera, so I could leave my Nikon at home; and it’s got a phone, so the Motorola RAZR got left behind, as did the Blackberry. The only thing that I insisted on continuing to use as a single-function device was my iPod; and unlike most teenagers and young adults, I only listen to my iPod when I’m exercising or trying to ignore the screaming brat sitting next to me on a long airplane flight.

But the real problem with an “all in one” device like the Palm Treo (or various other Windows-oriented all-in-one products) is that none of it works as well as the stand-alone best-of-breed, single-function devices. As noted earlier, once you’ve put your digital music on an iPod, why would you ever consider some other clunky device for storing and listening to music? Why would you tolerate the Treo’s “pull” approach for retrieving email (which only allows you to check for email once every five minutes), rather than the Blackberry’s “push” approach that sends an email to your device instantly? Why would you tolerate a 1-megapixel camera (on the Treo 650 and 680), or even the improved 3-megapixel camera on the 700, once you’ve used a standard digital pocket camera that has 5, 6, or 7-megapixel resolution? And why would you put up with the annoyingly cramped, small keyboard on the Treo when you can get a tolerably-sized keyboard on the BlackBerry, or a really generous keyboard on the Palm Pilot? And even the phone (at least on the 650) is relatively mediocre: about once a month, it would freeze so badly that I had to take the battery out, poke a paper-clip in the “hard reset” pin-hole, and watch all of my tediously entered speed-dial numbers disappear.

Even if you’ve got an all-in-one device that works tolerably well, as I judged my Treo 650 to work for at least a few months, you’re locked into the whole darn package — lock, stock, and barrel. So if a new, much-improved camera appears in the marketplace, you can’t use it, because there’s no way to unplug the camera in the integrated unit, and replace it with a new device from some other manufacturer. And the new stuff does appear at fairly frequent intervals: as noted above, Palm has released six different versions of its Treo in approximately four years. As also noted, some of them are only available in certain geographical regions; some are only supported by certain telecom carriers, and not others; and some will only support one operating system, but not another. So it’s not as if I would have wanted (or could have afforded) every single new version of the Treo that appeared; but with annual or semi-annual product releases from phone vendors, PDA vendors, music-player vendors, camera vendors, and email/Web-browser vendors, it’s almost inevitable that one would want to replace one “chunk” of functionality with another on a fairly regular basis.

As a result, I’ve now gone back to multiple devices — with one exception: I use my Blackberry (model 8700g) for both phone, email, and occasional Web browsing. My lifestyle is such that I don’t actually talk on a mobile phone very often; I probably send 100 email messages for every “voice” communication. So, while I actually preferred my Motorola RAZR phone for voice calls, I’ve found it more convenient to replace five single-function devices with one dual-function device and three other single-function devices.

One reason that the multitude of independent devices is more tolerable today than it was 4-5 years ago is that all of these devices have continued to get smaller, thinner, and lighter; the ultimate example, of course, is the new Apple “Shuffle” iPod, but even the “nano” iPod is pretty darn compact. I expect this trend to continue, and it means that I can easily stuff all of these items into one or two pockets, without feeling like I’m dragging along several pound-size bricks.

If the Treo 750 shows up in the U.S. marketplace, and if T-Mobile actually distributes it, I’m sure I’ll be tempted to consider the all-in-one approach once again. But hopefully I’ll have enough sense to re-read this blog posting of mine, and hopefully all of the single-function devices will have gotten that much better, and that much smaller in the meantime.