I've written a lot on this in the past, but I'll try to keep this one short
I've got 6-10 PDAs in my house including old Newtons and a Philips Velo. My current PDA is the Palm Tungsten, and I love it. My husband uses a Compaq iPaq which I stopped using a year or two ago.
The one thing I like about the Ipaq is real writing recognition. I'm a writer by trade, and this was a huge plus for me when I tried out this PDA. It's something that I've sorely missed from the old Newtons. So I ended up using the PPC device for almost a year.
I went back to my trusty Palms though, for several reasons:
1. PPC devices almost *require* that you use MS desktop products. I can't stand that.
2. PPC devices are too much of a "windows in a box". They're clunky and irritating to use.
3. Business and productivity software for a PPC was few and far between when I was using it. Everything seemed to be designed for "cool" and fun instead of being useful. (This was my biggest problem)
4. The PPC needed to be soft reset regularly due to memory leaks. Similar to how my desktop needs to be restarted regularly.
The Palm devices don't have handwriting recognition, but I can live with Graffiti. I'm very good at it and it satisfies my desire to "write" instead of type.
The speed and simplicity of a Palm is one of the reasons I love it. And the fact that there is a wealth of useful, productive software available is the other reason. The device is elegant, and most of the software is small, stable, and nice looking. You wont find many Palm apps that make you scroll to the right in order to see everything... you find this all the time with PPC apps.
I've been attached to the Palm V/5XX line for years because these are super small, and very attractive devices. I've never liked the III/VII models, or Handsprings with the plastic cases. These feel flimsy and cheap to me.
When the Tungsten T came out, I got one and am so glad I did. It has a very nice, solid, gorgeous case, and when the slider is closed it is slightly smaller than the V/5XX models. It has voice memo capability which is nice but I don't use it much, and it has beautiful color along with adjustable brightness. And the 5.0 OS is *extremely* fast.
In any case, I consider the Palm devices to be the best ones for using in a business/productivity setting.
Hope that helps,
Kathy