Here's a topic where you can tell us where you've been, what devices you've been using. Here's my story, the story of a Techno Tart;

Sharp
I blame my parents for buying me a Sharp Electronic Organiser. Back then it cost about £70, had 64Mb of RAM and contained an Address Book and Calendar.

Psion 5
My first proper PDA was (and I say this with the same tone of voice as one would use to describe their first girlfriend) a Psion Series 5. Wow! What a device! There was nothing it could not do! I even got 5 cows for an OPL application called ExtraBatt. It was and still is very powerful and a clear testament to the stability of Symbian even in the early stages!

HP Jornada
I was seduced by the colour screens of the HP Jornada 540. It may have looked like a Fisher Price toy, but it played Ok. Unfortunately, it was slow, crashed a lot and the PIM functionality was absolutely crap! If you donwloaded e-mails, left them on the server (to pick up at home) and picked them up at home (thus removing them from the server), the e-mail app on this Windows CE would panic and have all sorts of tantrums. It really was a terrible device.

Psion 5mx
What a beauty! What sheer elegance! This was the Series 5, but with so much more! I had no problem connecting this to the Internet with my Ericsson i888 World and it also hardly ever crashed! Even now, I'm tempted to go and buy me a new one because it really is a class device! The applications are awesome and I never ran out of memory on it!

Casio
Argh! I saw a picture of the new (as it was then) PocketPC in a magazine and fell in love. What kind of tart am I!? It could play music and video (well, nothing like the adverts suggested, but if you squinted your eyes, it looked Ok). It had Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, both of which are pathetic compared to Symbian's alternatives. Connectivity was a bit better, but the PIM was just as crap (that's right, 'crap', not 'slightly unsatisfactory', but 'crap'). Once you get used to Symbian PIM apps, anything else will disapoint.

This started to lose its attraction when the screen got grubby and the battery never lasted more than 5 minutes! Also, I saw how the PocketPC Community was getting more and more Nazi like in its approach to technology. I got well frightened by some of the people at pocketpc.com who cannot think outside of Microsoft and it's technology. I therefore decided to move on and leave behind my platform agnosticism.

Nokia 9210
What can I say? I used to look like batman with my Casio and my 7110 hanging from my belt, so the 9210 was a dream come true. Everything in one! Top office applications and pretty good PIM functionality (though not as good as the 5 and 5mx), this was and still is a definite move in the right direction!

It may be short on RAM, but it is still not as crashable as Microsoft's attempt at mobility. With top games being released for it, it is not the poor relative that Microsoft and Palm would have us believe.

It may not have the expansion slots of a PocketPC, but it is mobile enough to take it away with me wherever I go and not have to recharge!



So othere you have it, the confessions of a tart!

What devices have you used? Have you played the field? Have your experiences been positive?

Oh well...
I've always been loving portable computers :P Everything for me started in 1980 (or was it 1979?) with programmable calculators. I had a Texas TI-57 (http://www.datamath.org/Sci/MAJESTIC/TI-57.htm) then in 1982 the great quantum leap: the Sharp PC-1500 pocket computer (http://www.pc1500.com/)!
IMHO it was a fantastic device for those times, you could program it in Basic and also in Machine Language, and I also coded in machine language a "TRON" (do you remeber the movie? motorcycl maze...).
Then some handheld PCs; the nicest was a Compaq Aero, tiny, black/white lcd, very long battery life, including a small, cosy trackball.
Then I discovered the Nokia Communicators: I have the 9000i, the 9110, and now the 9210 with 128 M Ram (Micron... good and cheap).

I think that 9210 is almost an ideal pda, and it only needs much more RAM and a better browser (i.e. needs to be a 9210i!).

I am really tempted to get a 9210i (used), don't now if I can resist until a new model is presented. Also because GPRS in Italy is exceedingly expensive, so a plain GSM is adequate.

P.S. I got once also a Ipaq 3130 in a sale. Nice battery life, but I discovered that Pocket Pc is not good for me. Stylus writing is slow and prone to errors, calendar and contacts apps are not functional. I don't know what to do with the little beast, now. Maybe a toaster controller?

I started with various casio type "Databanks" and then moved on to a Psion 3, when that died (my fault) I got a Psion 3a (or was it 3c - can't remember , but I still have it).

Then nokia brought out the Nokia 9000 - an amazinf all in onve device that wouold save me having to carry my 3a (or c) and my nokia 5.1 (Orange) which when you dive a motorbike just carring the 1 phone instead of phone & PDA is a Godsend.

Next was the Nokia 9110 - this was heaven for me - it had an AMD 486 processor (I'm an AMD fan - my 16month old son is Adam Matthew Doherty - nice initials). This has to have been one of the most stable usable devices I have ever used. Sitting in a pub, get a call that the Sybase Server running on the RS6000 has gone AWAL I could dial in - restart the gateway all while having a pint and playing pool!!!

When the Nokia 9210 came out, the colour screen was just 2 tempting. I'm very happy with my 9210, but there are so many bits of the 9110 that I miss as well (including the stability), but I couldn't go back.

O2 XDA - I've just been given one of these in work to evaluate. I got it yesterday, so far about 10 reboots and 3 Format & start agains. The screen is nicely viewable in sunlight, but the resultion compared to the 9210 is total bollocks. Browser is good (IE) but there are lots of stpid things that piss me off (like when you write an e-mail and bring up contacts, it will let you click on a contact with no e-mail addy and it will put in the phone number as the to: and obviously complain when you try send it!!!

Anyway, back to work trying to break this XDA and persuade the powers that be that the company should by 9210's. (maybe they will buy me one and I can sell mine)...