It is interesting, both of my kids have been asking recently for PDA's to use for scheduling and notes and ebooks and so on. So naturally I pulled from my personal 'PDA Museum'
Here is what I found:
- The older stuff (Compaq C120, HP200LX, Newton, etc) was of no interest.
- HP Jornada 728 was just too huge for them. But I love that keyboard so I tried using it for my 'primary PDA' for a bit, found I had to go back to ActiveSync 3.8 and remembered how many problems there were ... made worse with XP and newer Outlook versions. Ended up sticking it back in storage.
- HP Jornada 548 - too slow to be useful anymore.
- HP iPaq 4355 - this is one I've used quite a bit, and the kids love it: great compromise and full of power with a decent thumbboard. My younger son has this one.
- Palm Tungsten C - nice thumboard, nice hardware and display, but the PalmOS has really not aged well. My older son is using this, but is envious of his brother.
- Psion Revo ... while I wish I still had my 5mx (not to the extent of paying the ~$300 - 500 I've seen them selling for online!), the Revo is *still* a sweet PDA and the OS is fantastic. Copy anywhere? Great ... and the ease of managing things is just great. I'm using this now ... just wish there was a micro-SD slot or something
PalmOS was great and peaked in the ~'98 timeframe (Palm V was quite good), but was never meant to handle this stuff.