PDAs for Census Takers

Cool tech.

It's the U.S. Census Bureau's first handheld computer (HHC), and it's coming to survey a home near you. Developed as part of a federal mandate to make census data collection more secure, officials hope the HHC will cut down on time, paper and human error during the next census. "We're expected to save a billion dollars," says Mike Murray, the HHC project leader for Harris Corp., the government contractor working on the device, more than 500,000 of which are being manufactured by mobile giant HTC.
When census takers get their hands on them, the HHCs will come with 10 hours of battery life to get through a day’s worth of door knocking—plus a built-in GPS unit to them to those doors in the first place. After collecting data with a stylus and step-by-step touchscreen interface, they can simply upload the information to U.S. Census headquarters via Sprint's encrypted data network. (A dial-up modem comes embedded for remote areas without wireless.) It’s all secured by a biometric fingerprint reader that keeps non-authorized users off the device—and the authorized ones off the phone with the bureau for forgetting passwords (21st-century bureaucracy wasn’t built in a day).