I do consider myself a techie but there are just too many widgets around for me to master each and every one of them. Last month, I was embarrassed by my own imbecility; maybe I should not crown myself a techie yet.

Coping with English in my secondary and tertiary years is not a simple task as I communicate solely in Chinese when I was growing up. Do not get me wrong here. Its not that I don't know my ABCs, just that when hanging out with friends or some foreign exchange students who speak perfect English, I immediately know that I'm one notch lower.

Throw a few jargons or bombastic words at me and I will probably be lost in all the talk. The solution is to have a bulky dictionary with me most of the time. Nowadays, I'm no longer dragging that dictionary around. Nah! My English had not improved much, just that I had embedded a dictionary into my phone. Now, I am truly a walking dictionary, provided that my smartphone is with me.

Windows Mobile and Palm OS based PDAs, PDA phones and some smartphones provide soft and hard full QWERTY keyboards so you can tap out the exact letter or number. It saves you a lot of trouble instead of using a normal keypad, pounding it repeatedly until the correct word appears or let its predictive text feature like T9 figure out the correct word.

Alright! Holidays all over and it is time to get serious with work. Just when you take out a full A4 size personal planner to jot down events and appointments, you noticed that there is something wrong in this picture.

Pens and papers in the 21st century? You got to be kidding me! Use smartphones for a change. On this month soft approach, PIM (Personal Information Manager) will be looked into. PIM functions pretty much like an organizer with more bling-bling incorporated into it. One can key in personal notes, addresses, task lists, significant calendar dates (birthdays, anniversaries, appointments or meeting), send email, instant message, fax communications, voicemail, project management features and even RSS/Atom feeds. Pretty neat huh?