A Personal Epiphany?
I spent a couple of hours this morning in a waiting room while my SUV was being serviced. Of course, I had my new Treo 300 with me and started using it right away in order to kill time.
During that time I performed the following tasks: I fetched and replied to email, I browsed the Web and accessed about 2 dozen sites, I handled a phone call from my wife, I posted an article to this Web site, and I sent an SMS message to my boss telling him I was going to be late for work. All using the tiny Treo!
While in the midst of this activity I reflected on how amazing it was that I was able to accomplish all these tasks on a small, relatively low-powered, and relatively cheap ($275 on eBay) device. I did a quick mental comparison to what the situation would have been like if I’d brought my much more sophisticated Toshiba e740 Pocket PC with me instead. No WiFi is available at my car dealer, so email, SMS, and Web surfing would have been out. I would have needed a separate cell phone to handle the call from my wife. I probably would have spent the time watching a video on my e740; an entertaining but not especially productive use of my time.
The end result of this experience and mental comparison is a shocking conclusion: if I had to give up one of my PDAs and get along with just one, it would be the Treo I’d keep!
For SMS, email, and virtually all of my Web browsing the SprintPCS CDMA 2.5G data network is completely adequate. The fact that the CDMA network is available to me virtually everywhere I go is more than enough of an advantage to overcome the speed advantage of WiFi, the larger and more sophisticated color screen of the e740, and it’s greater memory, expandability, and processor power. The Treo simply does just about everything I want from a connected PDA and it does it in a small and simple package.
1:27:57 PM 
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Sony has announced a really great looking Palm OS PDA, the 