Best pda without phone?

>["Followup-To:" header set to alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot.]
>On 2008-12-21, Pringles CheezUms <nowhere DeleteThis @nohow.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm looking for a basic pda, no phone. Color would be nice, but battery
>> life is more important.
>> I like my phone plan right now so don't want to switch.
>> I just want a pda for basic stuff like taking notes, schedule,
>> organizing, etc.
>> I used to have one several years ago and loved it. It was a wrench
>> giving it up (but not enough to keep the job.)
>> What is the best pda without a phone?
>>
>If you want a new one, there aren't many choices left. Tungsten E2 or
>Z22.

I don't mind used. I've been around long enough to know that 'new' very
often does not imply 'better'.

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:55:26 -0600, Pringles CheezUms
<nowhere RemoveThis @nohow.com> wrote:

>I'm looking for a basic pda, no phone. Color would be nice, but battery
>life is more important.
>I like my phone plan right now so don't want to switch.
>I just want a pda for basic stuff like taking notes, schedule,
>organizing, etc.
>I used to have one several years ago and loved it. It was a wrench
>giving it up (but not enough to keep the job.)
>What is the best pda without a phone?
>
>Thanks!

The Palm IIIxe is ancient and uses a serial or IR connection for
HotSync, but has 8MB RAM and runs for up to a month on 2 AAA cells.
They're still availa ble on Ebay for $30 - $40.

For rechargeable + color, I like the Zire 31 - it's about 23 the size
of theIIIxe, has 16MB RAM, and uses USB for HotSync.

I haven't checked the current used prices.

John

In article news:<1getk49oipne8cp3chuusm82st75d2uc49 RemoveThis @4ax.com>, Pringles
CheezUms wrote:
> I'm looking for a basic pda, no phone. Color would be nice, but
> battery life is more important.

Colour and long battery life are incompatible ... the current drawn by
even the most frugal of colour displays is simply huge compared with
that required for a greyscale display. Colour devices invariably have
built-in rechargeable batteries, mono devices tend to use standard-size
one-use (or rechargeable) batteries that are easier to replace.

When you say "basic PDA, no phone" do you mean that you want the PDA
itself to provide only basic functionality, or that you want a
highly-functional PDA but one that is "basic" in that it had no phone?
These are to different questions, and will receive very different
answers.

The best PDAs of their day were made by Psion -- these were
fully-functional pocket computers with their own suite of office
applications, and could run for months on a pair of AA batteries. Psion
pulled out of the consumer PDA market several years ago, and hived off
their PDA/phone software business as part of Symbian (in which they
have now sold all of their interest to Nokia). Symbian OS is, at it's
core, basically a unicode version of the same OS as was used in Psion's
32-bit "EPOC" OS.

Symbian OS doesn't seem to ship with quite such functional PIM apps as
the Psion PDAs had, but it's arguably the best thing going -- pity
there are no Symbian devices without phone functionality. There are
still second-hand and refurbished Psion devices in the retail chain,
though.

E.g.
http://www.clove.co.uk/viewProduct.aspx?Manufacturer=Psion&Item=Psion5m
x&Product=7381B3E2-97F2-49EB-9DC8-D1FFC9FFF35E&Category=1440A4FD-16EF-4
0BD-A5C1-052B6648A641

Apart from that, there are plain PDA devices available that run Palm's
Palm OS and that run Microsoft's Windows Mobile. Of the two I prefer
Palm -- apart from anything else the integration with Windows desktop
systems is better with Palm than with Windows Mobile, and the
office-compatible applications bundled with Palm devices are more
fully-featured than those supplied with Windows Mobile devices. OTOH
there are WM devices with built-in hardware features (such as GPS
navigation) that don't have direct equivalents from Palm.

> I like my phone plan right now so don't want to switch.

It is usually the case that you can buy a new smartphone without an
airtime contract and use it with your current plan. Phones bought
SIM-free are not locked to any network, and can usually be used on any
(subject to the constraints of incompatibility between GSM and CDMA,
etc).

The long and the short of it is that there are no really good non-phone
PDAs on the market at the moment. TBH the cost of some of the cheaper
smartphones is so low that it's scarcely worth considering a non-phone
PDA ... having said that: my Nokia 6310i (now discontinued) is such a
good dumbish-phone that I wouldn't swap it for the best smartphone in
the world, so I use a Palm Tungsten.

Cheers,
Daniel.

> CheezUms wrote:
> > I'm looking for a basic pda, no phone. Color would be nice, but
> > battery life is more important.

You may like your current phone now but are you very sure you will
never want to change it ? IMHO You would make a better investment if
you buy a Palm Centro and use its world famous PDA functionality for
now and the phone later just in case you ever want to.

Cheers,
-- Atul