The Census’ PDA: “Ugliest Cellphone” with “inaccurate maps”

From Ethan Zuckerman’s blog (via the Boston.com) comes a scary description of the device Harris put out for the first phase of the 2010 Census: the Harris HTC. Remember, the real door to door part will use pen and paper after the hardware was not satisfactory.

The device she had strapped to her hand was a Harris HTC, which looks either like the ugliest cellphone you’ve ever seen, or a Palm Pilot designed by the US government. We scrolled through bad, inaccurate maps of the area, which looked like they had been dumped from an early version of MapQuest, wondering how the ridge line behind my house magically had been transformed into a navigable road, and talked about the device.

My enumerator was reasonably fond of her HTC - there were serious ergonomic problems, like a power button that tended to get inadvertently pressed when gripping the device, powering it off.