PDAs for Insurance Agents

The HandsPC range of PDAs are meant for insurance agents. They come pre-loaded with software that is designed specifically for particular insurance companies, and the ones we received were aimed at LIC and Alliaz Bajaj insurance agents. 

These are simple PDAs without any luxury software, working on Penbex operating system, which is an open OS for PDAs and mobiles. The PDAs have all the usual applications like, calculator, address book, notepad, and world clock, which come with the Penbex OS. But in addition, they have three groups of applications specifically meant for LIC/AB agents. The groups are LIC/AB Policy, LIC/AB Report and LIC/AB Agent. The LIC/AB Policy section contains an application related to the marketing activities of an LIC agent, like guidelines, features and information about various LIC/AB policies. The LIC/AB Agent section provides applications to manage received data. These are meant to maintain databases of users and agents.

From here you can also backup, restore or sync the data to your PC. The LIC/AB Report section helps in maintaining customer services by producing different types of reports ranging from daily to yearly basis. These also include reports about business conducted over a period of time, birthdays, anniversaries of prospective or existing clients. 

S N   A   P   S   H O   T HandsPC 1300 PDA Price : Rs 12,400 with 1 year warranty Key specs : Useful Software, CF-card slot for memory or modem connectivity Contact : Pushpam Computers and Softwares, Pune. Tel : 91-20-4215162. E-mail : sachin@pushpam.com

The HandsPC 1100 model does not come with any fancy extensions, like CF-card slot etc. It’s just a plain vanilla PDA with 8 MB RAM and 2 MB ROM. The processor is a Motorola 68EZ328 16 MHz. The HandsPC1300 on the other hand, has a CF (Compact Flash) slot. We even received a CF modem with the PDA, which was easy to use and worked fine. This model runs on a Motorola 68VZ328 33 MHz processor with 4 MB flash ROM and 8 MB RAM.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T HandsPC 1100 PDA Price : Rs. 7,500 with 1 year warranty Key specs : Affordable, useful software for an Allianz Bajaj insurance agent Contact : Pushpam Computers and Softwares, Pune. Tel : 91-20-4215162. Website :  www.pushpam.com\comp\handspc.htm   E-mail : sachin@pushpam.com

Both PDAs run on Lithium Ion batteries. Their looks and interface are very average and you will have no flash-value carrying one of these. They connect to a PC with a serial connector and even have an InfraRed sensor for wireless data transfers. For entering text into the PDAs, they have an onscreen keyboard as well as a handwriting recognition language. This is different from Graffiti in Palm PDAs, and takes time getting used to. 

Using the software isn’t very difficult, and can be quite useful for insurance agents in their day-to-day activities. It reduces the need for insurance agents to carry a lot of paper pertaining to policy and customer info, prospects, etc. It can also send reminders to the agent about the policy payments due from customers. The company is planning to launch similar PDAs for other insurance companies by July end. 

Anindya Roy and Shruti Pareek