Editor's choice: Nokia 9300With mobile phones rapidly becoming a personal item like jewellery, many users are to some extent willing to overlook functionality for form. So it is with considerable trepidation that we embark on the Editor's Choice award.
If size is not at issue, and you are quite happy to sacrifice portability for sheer power and functionality, then the O2 or i-mate would be a good place to start.
We prefer the O2 over the i-mate because we found we hardly ever used the i-mate's slide-out keyboard. Provided you are happy to carry the O2 around (in your jacket pocket), it's a powerful PDA that doubles as a mobile phone.
The best overall compromise between a PDA and a mobile phone, and winner of Editor's Choice, is the quirky but remarkably functional Nokia 9300 which has by far the most usable keyboard of the lot -- a surprisingly good non-touch display with effective navigation buttons, and its memory can be expanded to an incredible 2GB.
We should mention that with a Vodafone SIM, the Nokia had arguably the best sensitivity of the lot. Battery life of between 150 to 200 hours standby, and three-to-seven hours talk time is relatively low, but the phone's sensitivity may well even this out.
Running a reasonably close second to the Nokia were the PalmOne Treo, and Blackberry 7100v -- all are remarkably functional with their own individual interfaces, and a lot of people will already be familiar with the Palm interface.
Some will no doubt master the tiny keys of the Treo and find the integrated QWERTY keyboard a boon. Others will come to grips with the weird key layout of the Blackberry and wonder what all the fuss is about.
This article was first published in Technology & Business magazine.
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Although it is not quite available yet, you must also check out the next HP iPAQ 6500 - it is the size of a Blackberry 7230, but so much more capable; quad-band phone with EDGE, 1.3Mpix camera & LED flash, Bluetooth (no WiFi), GPS!!!!, and the usual PPC2003SE stuff (hopefully upgradeable to WindowsMobile5.0 in Oct or so).
http://www.brighthand.com/article/iPAQ_hw6500_Coming_in_September?site=SmartPhone
http://davesipaq.com/news/ipaq_hw6500_comparison.html
And here is a link to some recent forum comment about the size (smaller than a normal iPAQ), battery life (better than a normal iPAQ, not as good as a Blackberry!) and built in keyboard (very similar to Blackberry).
http://davesipaq.com/forum/showthread.php?p=35358#post35358
It is already released in Germany & UK (in theory at least!) and I'm hoping to see it in Australia in Aug or Sept..