My wife asked for one for Christmas. Not being a gadget guy, I can either:

a) Do some research by reading articles, consulting Consumer Reports and doing net searches (on Goooooooooooooogle perhaps?) or

b) Tap into the vast braintrust that is this BB

So....


Anyone have a PDA they'd like to recommend? One thing to keep in mind is that my wife has a low-BS level (I have to wonder why she married me in the first place). So instinctively-easy-to-use is a big plus for her. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Oh, to keep in OT, she'll use the PDA to keep track of the movies on our Netflix queue....

José

I've done a little bit of looking into them, as my wife wanted to know what I wanted for my birthday. I was looking towards these things, but cracked the shits when researching them and told her I would prefer teh new S625x Polar Heart Rate Monitor. Bear in mind, the people I get to talk to about the products they are trying to sell me do not share the same mother tongue as me. Frustration and the desire to strangle them are now a part of me and I must use my Vulcan meditation techniques to control them.

but, basically you need to choose between:

Palm based and Windows based

Make sure you get a cradle to link and update all your contacts off your computer. (either Palm or say HP will be able to up and download all your contacts). Either this or you can use built in infra red to send to your laptop, but if you have a desktop, you will need to buy an external infra red detector thingy.

Memory cards: There seemed to be two different types, one called a compact flash card and one called an SD card. I was getting conused between the two - and maybe they're the same bloody thing?!? but just like Mac vs PC, even though one might be better than the other, one has a lot more applications and games and peripherals to contect to then the other one.

2 ways to connect to the internet: Do you want to be sitting is star bucks and pretend to be some sort of yuppie and link with a Wi Fi station accessing the internet or do you want to you "Blue Tooth" to connect to your (approved) mobile phone which then connects to the internet? the main reason I pulled out of the whole PDA thing was my job doesn't really need one and my wife has an old crappy compaq / hp one which still (barely) works and backs up contacts and things for us any way). When that craps its dacks I'll consider getting another one. The other reason was the connection speeds to the internet. I think it would be like going back to the dark ages. I'm used to broadband at 10 Mbps. I think these things are slower than 56k.

Palm seesm to be the more popular out there, but HP seems to be starting to hold its own.

I think I'd be leaning towards the Palm Tungsten E, mostly becasue of the amount of applications you can get for it.

Clear as mud!

please let me know which one you end up getting! :dude:

I hae a Toshiba and it serves me OK. The price point was unbeatable at $145. But definately get built in wireless and as many card ports as you can find.

All said and done, either get a Palm or an HP Ipaq. The models will offer you better and better stuff for the more you pay so that is all your call.
But Palm and HP are the 2 leading brands for PDA's due to their compatablity.

For example in with a Palm (Non-Windows) PDA everything that is made for the Palm OS works with them. Some Sony Clie's do not work with certain Palm OS gadgets (GPS comes to mind).
And HP has a deal with Microsoft that all products that are "Certified Windows CE" or "Windows XP Portable" are certified on an HP IPaq (Formerly the Compaq Ipaq).

Now on your choice, put it this way, if you are very teckie then you want a Palm OS PDA. It has more gadgets. More tweakablity. And more to play around with.
If you want an out of the box, non-teckie, everybody else PDA you want a Windows PDA.

Put it the same a real computer, Windows is something everyone knows how to use. It is user friendly and pretty, but not necessarily the best out there. Linux is very tricky to master but has a better foundation and can be incredible if you want to spend the time tuning up and tweking it perfect. But Linux is not made for the everyday computer user.

That being said I have an Ipaq (for some games and PDF reading) and a Treo for power and fun.

But as with all techie stuff, YMMV

Blackberry?

Blackberry is an interesting little service. It really is more of a remote email device than a PDA. I give you a new email address that will be assigned to your device.

If you are looking for true "real world" internet freedom. I would really recommend some of the nice PDA type phones available from Sprint.
While a bit more pricey, then tend to be nice machines. I have to support several models here at work.

Hey thanks guys. I'll start looking into the models you recommended. I'm pretty sure my wife only wants to keep contact information, but I can't go wrong if I get her a model that has a few more cool things with it.
Thanks again!

José

Since I just went through this buying decision, here is recap.

I ended up getting the Palm Tungsten T3, with the 50% larger stregth screen. It has blue tooth built-in, a 400 mHz processor, MSOffice compatible software, and comes with the cradle. I choose this one over the unit with WI-FI since Palm just introduced a WI-FI sd-card. You can download mp3 music files and DVD movies to the unit for watching/listening. The only gripe I can see is that the battery may not be as robust as one needs.

I am told that this Palm device can handle upto 512meg of sd-card flash memory. This makes this thing more powerful than the work pc I had 5 years ago.

The best place to get this is either e-bay or newegg.com. The best price I found was $299.00! This unit SRP at $400.00 everywhere else. The unit is the international Asian-Pacific unit;

PalmOne Tungsten T3(P80870CN) International Version 400MHz, 320x480 TFT, 64MB, Palm OS v5.2.1 PDA Handheld PC

Model# P80870CN Item # N82E16858101131


It appears that these guys took advantage of the exchange rate and brought over a bunch of these.