I was an early adopter of Palm devices -- my first was a 3Com PalmPilot, in fact. From Palm I went to Handspring with the very nifty Springboards, and then back to Palm with the early Treo. I was very satisfied with the Treo, and I had a folding keyboard that could be used to edit MS Word documents. I agree that the Palm OS has an elegance of design which no other desktop application really matched.

Unfortunately, the keyboard finally fell apart and I lost the Treo in Tierra del Fuego. Palm no longer made that model, so I replaced it with the Treo 680 and a Bluetooth folding keyboard, which came with enough bugs to make the system almost impossible to use. It was a fairly simple matter to make the Word client crash simply by pressing the down arrow key on the folding keyboard.

So I left the Palm OS and got an iPhone, which is an excellent phone and thin Internet device, but which is not an organizer. It's quite useful for walking around town, but unlike the Treo it's not a serious portable computer.

I picked up an ASUS EEEPC for a trip I was taking, and found that to be a very good portable word processing platform, which more or less filled my need for a walk-around word processor.

Meanwhile, I got a new job an a BlackBerry 8820, which connects wirelessly to the Outlook Enterprise Server at work. So now I'm basically using two organizers, with the iPhone handling my personal life and the BlackBerry my professional life.

-- John Nowak