Like Ace_NoOne said, PDAs don’t seem to have much offering at the end of the road with all the new ultra portable laptops/tablet pc coming out today.

good luck

All Windows PDA comes with Pocket Excel and Notes (which lets you draw/write directly into the note, not a Palm special character stroke lunacy.)

Another reason for recommending a Windows based PDA are the hacks available at: alt.binaries.warez.pocketpc and alt.binaries.ebook.*

I do find that if you’re a heavy user, don’t buy a PDA that has a slide out keypad. They tend to break. Just get one massive unit with no moving parts.

I also own a Windows Mobile PDA Phone, one of the newer Kind, a E-Ten M700. It comes with WM6 (okay, I did a firmware update, but the new Versions got WM6), WiFi, Bluetooth and – my reasons for buying it – a full slide-out QWERTZ-Keyboard as well as a GPS Receiver. CPU Speed is 400MHz, though it is an older processor.
While GPS is not for you, they keyboard really’ll get you, so try get one with a slide-out.
When it comes to support, I’d really recommend you to go with the larger brands, my favorite among them being HTC. They – usually – offer decent battery life, the whole wireless-connectivity-thingy and you can buy lots of stuff for them, just like the DELL Axims.
Thing is, they mostly manufacture PDA Phones, plain-old-PDAs are indeed found less on the market than two years ago. I also think, that one device for both is enough, since the PDA is big enough in your pockets.
Working about 1 hour or so with the thing on a daily basis, the battery stays alive for two or three days with the phone module enabled, decent enough for me.
As for the Transcribing-Function in Windows Mobile, it could never make any sense of anything I have written with the stylus, so i just left it alone and stuck with the QWERTZi…

I didn’t use it much for the first few months, but now after learning GTD I use it all the time, plus I can run Pocket Blender on it and also WiFiTunes (a nifty app allowing you to stream tunes from your iTunes library on your local network that you are sharing (of course, I shun iTunes software itself, so I am using the excellent Firefly Media Server on my NSLU2 instead, I can’t stomach all this Apple love…Quicktime…get out of my systemtray)). Its got an ok amount of memory, 64MB, which goes down to about 15MB free after it is up and running and start up apps have loaded, and has a ~300Mhz processor.

I doubt you would need much more than that for what you want to do with it. The plus for going for an older version like the X30 (or even the X50 which is getting a little old now) is that all the accessories for it are nice and cheap now. I recently picked up a cradle for it for £5 off eBay and a new 2000mAh battery (it is sold with a 700mAh one) for about £10. There is also a 600Mhz version of the X30 floating around if you want real whizz bang. People might say go with a Smartphone (I’ve got a Nokia N73) and whilst it also has Pocket Office, as you mention, the interface is too fiddly, a touchscreen is much easier to use for data entry.

Happy hunting

I’d rather have one unit that does both (phone and PDA) than plopping two units in my bag.

*cringes in recommending M$* But hey they’re doing well at it.