went out of business & sold their ip so some major corp.

Not sure who else has anything like them.

I have had nothing but trouble with the PDAs mostly to do with networking. I think the D-Link card has failed completely although the lights say it is working but now I am unable to access networks on either iPAQ or Zaurus.

What has really pissed me off and alienated me re PDAs is this bit of bastardry by MS that means you have to install the software for a WIN2002 PDA, onto your PC to get it to install on the PDA - this garbage was cluttering up my PC with heaps of crap I don't want on it. At least with the Palm, one can download & install an app without having to do so thru a PC. I am sure there are apps that will do same on Win2002 but Microsoft seem to have made sure you need a Windows PC to make any decent use of their Win2002.

When Sony come out with this Vaio shown, in an English version. I will get one of them & probably use that and if I want PDA capability (not quite sure why) will use the SONY PALM powered one.

The piddly input to PDAs, their unreliability (Yesterday I found the battery had gone flat in 2 of them (iPAQ & Zaurus) they reset themselves back to state at time of delivery. Bye bye data & changes). Most people are aware of this problem which is mostly with the rechargeable PDAs. Battery powered ones (non colour) last a long time & allow you to change the batterys without data loss.

After playing with the 5 I have - I consider them too tedious for the trouble. At least with that Sony PC box I would have a 20GB drive & don't lose data when the batterys go down. The keyboard is workable. The screen a lot better than a PDA screen (Scrolling web pages l-to-r & up-to-down to see the content is plain frustrating). The SONY box doesn't have CD-Rom but I have now discovered that with PCMCIA CF cards & Sony 128MB Mem sticks, I no longer seem to need a CD-Rom, but can attach a USB one or can network attach one for installs.

Perhaps my summary is that a PDA is better than nothing - just not quite sure by what margin. They are good as a lightweight device for storing important data such as bank info, web logins & accounts, contacts, etc: etc:.

Cheers

Doug