Well I bought Palm IIIe around 2000. I used it regularly as a PDA, mainly the apps plus the PIM functions. I was addicted to PIM already as I had been previously using two models of Casio Databank watches that had phonebook and an organizer(!).
Then I got Palm m125 back in 2002. The main enhancement was the usage of SD/MMC card. Both of my palms were B/W but it suited me as core functionality (plus the gaming) was realised. At those times, I used only freeware/shareware apps. Unfortunately the said palm fell and broke on 2004.
But the era of mobile phones reached the level of colour screen and J2ME apps. At that time I had Siemens S55 mobile, so I switched altogether with many apps to that device. At that point I was using proprietary Java apps also. The said cell phone had a digital camera addon which I got next year. It supported no memorty cards. Next year I switched to Nokia 6230i with the camera and MMC cards support. That was the time of my extensive using mobile apps, including games, that were all in colour. Both cellphones had proprietary OS though, alas Java been the open API.
Then I subsequently got cell phones with either Symbian (Nokia E65, E75) or Win Mobile (HTC S710). This is what I call modern PDAs that is, PDAs with integrated voice+WWAN. Recently I got a Blackberry. All those mobile phones (except for E65) have qwerty keyboard as I now presume it a must-have due to exhaustive messaging use. I also had Targus keyboard attached to my palm m125.
Now I consider Kindle when I get to the US (which is next Saturday), to be serving as a PDA-like with its WiFI browser capabilities, also with GMail support via www.
I also had a certain mobile device been worth mentioning. It was the C-Pen. Basically that was a really fat pen serving as FineReader's OCR scanner so that one could scan all printed documents and place the text in txt files to be sent by IrDA or a serial cable. It also had some dictionaries built-in which is quite a nice option when one learns some foreign language; after scanning a word, definition pops up in less than a second. So this could be considered an e-dictionary also. It had C API so one could write apps for it. Unfortunately the company had troubles and now produces only the scanners attached via usb (so no more mobile).
