Credit Cards: are they PDAs?

I've been thinking about the term PDA. It comes from, as far as I am aware, John Sculley's evangelising of what was to eventually become the Newton. The Newton was Sculley's pet project as Chief Technology Officer at Apple, and remains the one great leap that Apple made during his Chairmanship. PDA stands for Personal Digital Assistant, which in itself is pretty meaningless, but is associated with the portable electronic devices that take up a large share of Dixons shelf space.

Somehow the PDA tag has become hackneyed, implying strictly a small computer with a touch sensitive screen or mini keyboard, and with a standard set of functions: diary, to do list, contacts, calculator, and sometimes a notepad and email. But if you step back and take a wider view, there are many other devices in common use that fit the label far better. Take credit cards, for instance. The magnetic stripe on a credit cards holds a remarkable amount of personal information about you, and becomes remarkably useful in a large number of routine, everyday interactions: shopping for groceries, buying petrol, or even just withdrawing cash from an ATM. Telephone credit cards aren't as common in this country, but are an equally important part of a business travellers toolkit in the United States, for example. And on this hangs a tale...

As a fairly typical British business traveller, most of the time I end up in a hotel in an American city, with a phone connection that I can use to dial direct either to home, or to a local Compuserve node. The rates are extortionate, a markup of 100% for international calls and a flat fee of 75c for an otherwise free local call is by no means unusual, but the ease of connection has always allowed me to dodge a guilty conscience. However, I have recently been staying in remoter locations in motels, which sometime have the same arrangement as the slicker hotels, but more typically will provide a phone with free local calls only.

This is fine for the American business traveller, as they all seem to have telephone credit cards that can be used to recharge any call to their own personal bill, just by dialling 8 for a line instead of 9. The various American phone companies seem to use this as a common method; dial 8, then your number, then a short pause to connect, then your card number. All American developed PDAs have dialling programs with this sequence already preprogrammed; you just have to enter your card number. It is easy to get an American phone card; free samples are in most airlines inflight magazines, or handed out at airports. You may get some free time, but you will have to call a free number on the card and quote a real credit card number to the operator to charge the bill to. Rates for these cards are very competitive; most are cheaper than the equivalent USA domestic phone charges via AT&T, and you can get substantial (25%+) discounts on international calls if you shop around.

The equivalent from British Telecom is the BT Chargecard - or so BT would like you to think. There are one or two differences. First of all, you can't use the 8 prefix and an automated sequence like American cards; instead you have to dial an 800 free call number, listen to a message, and then enter the card number and PIN (Personal Identification Number), and eventually the number your are trying to reach. This is a challenge to enter into a PDAs setup: the number you are calling will disappear into invisibility off the far right hand edge of one of the boxes used to enter these sequences. The pause time is also unpredictable, because BT seem to validate your card before accepting the number, and woe betide anyone who types ahead. The next problem is that charge rates are astronomical: using one of these cards in the UK is now a flat fee 20p per minute for all calls, and for a call across San Francisco, for example, will cost you 1.76 GBP per minute. This makes the typical 200% hotel markups look positively generous! Even a call to the UK is 92p per minute with a BT Chargecard, as against 23p per minute directly dialled from the UK to USA.

If you frequently travel to the United States, then I can strongly recommend that you get a US style phone charge card, and not a BT Chargecard; it is well worth it.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: November 21, 1997