3. Palm OS - Innovation Slowdown

The Palm OS camp can no longer keep up with the innovative drive of Pocket PC manufacturers. In fact, the only manufacturers that have launched attractive products for a while are Handspring and Sony. Handspring remains faithful to the original design of Palm PDAs: the main advantages that Palm OS devices offer over the Pocket PC competitors are their ease of use, monochrome displays and long-lasting batteries. As a Palm PDA, the Handspring Visor Pro has 16 MB RAM. The approach that Sony follows with the Clié PEG-N770C is entirely different. With its high-resolution color display and an MP3 player, the Clié is a mobile multimedia console. Since Pocket PCs and Palm PDAs are based on fundamentally different designs, the results of the Palms have not been included in the overall evaluation.

Only Drawback - Hefty Price Tag

It's hard to go wrong with any of these PDAs. If you're not dead set on Bluetooth functionality, you should choose your model based on the price. For example, Toshiba offers a Pocket PC that is expandable with CF and SD cards for the relatively low price of $569. Even further down the price scale, the HP Jornada 565 retails for only $549.

Recommendations

Compaq iPAQ H3870

Our recommendation goes to the Compaq Ipaq H3870. What makes this Pocket PC particularly special are its excellent ergonomic features and the fact that it is the only Pocket PC to come equipped with Bluetooth technology.

Hewlett Packard Jornada 565

The Jornada 565 from Hewlett-Packard gets good to very good scores in terms of performance, features and ergonomic design. Even more attractive is the price of this Pocket PC - the lowest of the group. Because of this, THG awards the Jornada 565 its "Value Recommendation".