We had one of the special releases of this version of the Palm, which comes with a translucent plastic shell

In the past, Palm's approach to PDA design has been clear: keep things simple and produce slick devices with adequate specifications for note taking, appointment tracking and contact organisation.

It's been a long time between Palm releases, but the Tungsten T makes the wait worthwhile.

Palm's primary considerations for the IIIc,s design brief was battery life, size and weight

Functionally the daVinci is the bare minimum as far as PDAs go so I was intrigued with the idea of a PalmOS device for $329.

Palm has embraced Microsoft, creating a neat 3G business phone in the process.

It's not for meetings, it's for meeting up. If you don't like the bulk of a Treo, here's your smartphone.

The Zire 71 isn't a business tool. It's not even a straight forward personal organiser. Palm is targeting the ears of Sony's CLIÉ range, the new PDA boasts not only a headphone jack for MP3 player use, but also a 640 x 480 camera. The camera is ingeniously hidden behind the metal backplate. To activate, you simply slide down the backplate to reveal the lens, the screen becoming a viewfinder. You can save photos to the memory – 12.7MB before you start loading programs – or to an SD/MMC card that slips into the top-mounted slot.

Palm's m100 series was designed to replace the III series as a low-end mono PDA

Poor value and lacks a few high-end features.

The past two years have been littered with attempts at combining a phone with a PDA. The first was O2 with its XDA (January 2003, page 41) - an excellent first try, and one that will be revised this month.

The Treo Pro finally brings Palm's flagship smartphone into the modern age. It's available exclusively from Telstra on Next G, and unlike its cousin the Centro it comes with WiFi.

The 650 really picks up where the 600 left off, and while it doesn't look too different to the eye, many of the changes are under the hood or subtle manipulations of the 600's design. It runs the new Palm OS 5.4 and has a much faster 312MHz Intel PXA270 processor, but the most immediate difference is the screen: it's now double the resolution at 320 x 320.

Handheld PC

No high-speed internet or bells and whistles, but an easy-to-use and pocketable email phone nonetheless

The m505 is also the only device in the Labs to feature vibrating alarm alerts.

With a hefty 8Mb of storage - four times that of the Palm V and Palm IIIe, it,s doubtful that you,ll ever have to worry about running out of space for applications and data.

At this stage you can get modules for games, memory expansion and backup, a digital camera, an MP3 player, a GPS and a mobile phone module

Palm OS stays on life support longer than expected.

Linux to replace Palm OS by the end of this year.