Access and Mobility of Wireless PDA Users

A paper Marvin McNett and Geoffrey M. Voelker on the use of PDA at the University of California San Diego “Access and Mobility of Wireless PDA Users“. A few quotes:

“First, rather than purchasing the PDAs for an explicit need (e.g., as with laptops), students were simply given the devices for being a New College freshman independent of whether students wanted the device. Because these users are from a variety of different majors and interests, it is likely that some opted to stop using the device after an initial trial.”

“A second contributing factor was the fact that a complete depletion of battery resulting in a device hard reset occurred more often than initially expected. Since our tracing module resided in soft state on the PDAs, a hardreset permanently removed all pre-installed software (including WTD). This situation may have also contributed to students abandoning their devices.”

“Half the users powered up their PDA more than 21 days during the trace. A few users used their PDA nearly every day.”

“The median session duration, or the time a PDA remains connected to the wireless network, was only 6.25 minutes compared to 16.6 minutes for laptop users.”

“Furthermore, we found that the PDA users were about twice as mobile as laptop users in terms of the number of access points they associated with in the same time period.”

“We find that students are relatively mobile and use their PDAs in many locations.”