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Debbie Chong can't remember a time when she didn't use a personal digital assistant to help her stay organized. The San Francisco executive has relied on a succession of PDAs--from the basic Sharp Zaurus she used ten years ago to the Compaq IPaq 3635 Pocket PC she relies on today--to keep her life on track.

Chong is CEO of Virtual Boardwalk, a provider of Web services in the conventions industry. Like many people, she uses her PDA for e-mail, appointments, and storing contacts. But she also uses it to store electronic maps. "I depend on the calendar and contacts the most, and I keep a lot of discrete bits of information about people," she says. "When I travel, I use Pocket Streets to find their offices."

The latest Pocket PCs add even more features than Chong's IPaq has; but at up to $600, the devices can be costly. Fortunately, you don't have to spend a big chunk of change to get a PDA that can help you organize your life: Plenty of simpler, cheaper PDAs will satisfy users who don't need advanced functions. To provide an overview of the PDAs currently available, we divided handhelds into three categories: basic PDAs, advanced PDAs, and the new breed of combined PDA/cell phone products (also known as communicators). This third group of devices supposedly provides an all-in-one means for staying in touch; but as our evaluations reveal, a single device that can handle both tasks well remains some distance away.

Much has changed since our last PDA roundup, " Palm vs. Pocket PC" in April 2001. Of the 12 PDAs we reviewed then, only one is still around in the same form (the Handspring Visor Prism); the others have been discontinued or superseded by updated models.

Vendors have also seen some major changes in market share: In 2001, Palm's share fell to 58 percent of the market, significantly down from the 71 percent it commanded in 2000, according to research firm NPD Techworld.

A Palm in Your Pocket or a Pocket in Your Palm?

Overall, between Pocket PC and Palm OS devices, Palm-based units remain the cheaper and simpler choices, so for this review we put most of them into the basic category. Palm recently launched a model that would fit in the upscale category--a wireless e-mail PDA, the I705. See our news story about this device.

Pocket PCs still rule in sex appeal, with a greater number of built-in functions, including digital audio and video playback. Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 includes pocket versions of programs such as Microsoft Word. Nevertheless, Palm claims that more third-party applications are available for Palm OS-based PDAs than for Pocket PCs.

Pocket PC devices have more memory (up to 64MB), though the Pocket PC operating system requires more memory than the Palm OS to run. They also offer four input methods, including the Transcriber handwriting recognition application and Block Recognizer, a character recognition application similar to Palm's Graffiti. For more on Pocket PCs, see our November News & Trends story " Pocket PC 2002."

On the other hand, most Palm-based PDAs use their battery power more efficiently. While most Pocket PCs still require daily charging, gray-scale Palm-based PDAs can go days or weeks before needing fresh batteries or a recharge.

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