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Work. Leisure. Even dating. His electronic organizer has improved just about every area of his life, claims Christopher Pfeiffer, an enthusiastic Compaq IPaq owner. Pfeiffer, director of programming at Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Outrage Entertainment, a PC games company, takes notes on the IPaq at company meetings, catches up on e-mail messages while lying in bed, and plugs in headphones to listen to MP3s at the gym. The IPaq even helped further a personal relationship; after failing to write down the phone number of a new friend scheduled for wisdom-teeth surgery that day, Pfeiffer found it among the e-mail he had downloaded to the IPaq before leaving his apartment. "She thought it was so sweet that I remembered to call, it led to our first date."

Peter da Silva, a software engineer for ABB Network Management, an industrial and utility control systems provider for power companies, is just as enamored of his Handspring Visor Deluxe, a PDA based on the Palm operating system--but for more practical reasons: It's a work tool. In addition to taking notes and scheduling his day on his Visor, he uses it with a serial cable to help configure and diagnose problems in networking equipment such as routers and modems. In da Silva's opinion, its OS makes the Palm quicker and more reliable than the newer Pocket PCs. He's tried the IPaq, but its OS was too much like Windows for him. "It hangs for 30 seconds or more for no apparent reason," da Silva complains.

More and more professionals and consumers are relying on PDAs. According to the Gartner Group, sales of handhelds in the United States will increase by 300 percent to about 28 million over the next four years. Not too long ago, the choice was simple: The 5-ounce, monochrome-display Palm III reigned as the de facto standard because it was practically the only option. These days, shopping for a PDA means sifting through lots of choices.

Consider the Pocket PC PDAs that are based on the latest version of Windows CE from Microsoft. About the same size as Palms, but with color screens and Pocket versions of familiar Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel, Pocket PCs make the first good case for Palm fans to switch (see " Pocket PC or Palm: Which Will Win Out?" for more on this competition).

Which to buy? We looked at 12 in all, and put each to the test in six areas: note taking, personal information management, e-mail, expense tracking, document handling, and entertainment.

Here's what we found.

Carla Thornton is a contributing editor for PC World.

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