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PDA, Take a Note

Best Compaq IPaq H3600, Casio Cassiopeia EM-500, HP Jornada 720

Worst Diamond Mako, RIM BlackBerry 957

There's a reason PDAs aren't called personal note-taking assistants: Most are terrible input devices. Poor handwriting recognition software and cramped keyboards can thwart efforts to add a phone number correctly, much less allow you to take notes during a fast-paced meeting. This latest crop of PDAs, however, gave us a couple of pleasant surprises.

Palmtop devices rely mainly on character recognition, and none outperform the new Pocket PCs. Transcriber, an application on the ActiveSync CD-ROM included with the Casio and the IPaq (but not preinstalled on these devices), represents a major advance in handwriting translation. More streamlined and flexible than either the Pocket PC's onboard Character Recognizer software or Palm's Graffiti, Transcriber accepts characters scrawled on any part of the screen in any application. We mixed cursive with letter printing; Transcriber got the words right most of the time, though it did have trouble with some people's scrawly handwriting. Filling in forms with Transcriber was a snap: Write anywhere on the screen, and the application puts the recognized text wherever the cursor is.

Even fast longhand can't keep up in some situations, however. For writing long e-mails or taking detailed minutes, a PDA keyboard like Targus's $99 Stowaway is your best bet. This travel keyboard for Palms is as big as a notebook's, yet it weighs only 7.9 ounces and conveniently folds in fourths down to the size of the PDA itself. Using one, we zipped along at 70 words per minute, with every single stroke entered correctly on the attached Palm. The device now is also available for the IPaq.

At the price of extra weight, the 1.1-pound Jornada 720 offers a relatively large built-in keyboard. Once we got used to a few oddly placed keys, we touch-typed at about 40 wpm on the 7-inch-wide keyboard, with few mistakes.

The Mako and BlackBerry, both of which include small keyboards, rank at the bottom of our list for quick note taking. The Mako's 5.5-inch-long keyboard is too small and shallow for all but the most determined hunt-and-peck typists. The BlackBerry's tiny keyboard is only good for typing out a short e-mail reply.

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