decent(ish) lower price PDAs?

[MikeRox]

Hi, am looking into getting a PDA for jotting down lecture notes and storing all my coursework deadlines and what not in. Anyone got any suggestions of good models? Main requirement is a full QWERTY keyboard either built into the unit or as an easily obtainible add on and then also be able to run the obvious word, excel, powerpoint etc .

I'm hoping to get one for about ?100 highest I can afford to go is ?160ish, my m8 got a nice one off ebay for ?25 but I'm lookin for something slightly better than that.

[superkully]

Don't do it man, even a good PDA like mine ain't better than a good quality, _paper_ notebook. Handwriting recognition isn't good enough yet (can it get better) and the screen is too small to make good notes on.

Put the money towards paying off the huge student loan you'll have!

[MikeRox]

unfortunately I can't write quickly and neatly for anything more then 5 minutes as my hand gets seriously bad cramp, and in fact, I either write ledgibly, or quickly, last year my notes were near impossibly to read, and having had a mess around with my m8s Pocket PC I can acctually use the touch screen on that to write as fast. It would just be alot easier than typing up notes after each lecture to make sure I can still read them anything more than a week after I wrote them.

Been offered a Toshiba e800 for ?110 anyway on these very forums so that will do me nicely especially as I was planning buying an mp3 player too and this will double up as one so technically it's free

[Geezer]

I've just gone back to uni and have been thinking the same thing. I'd like to spend ?100 to ?130, maybe ?140, anyone got any ideas?

Geezer

[ascender]

The best budget PDA is the Palm Tungsten E which can do a hell of a lot if you want it to - ?140 new. If you look above that you start getting into Pocket PCs and mroe expensive Palms which unless you really need the power, are a waste of money IMO.

A Tungsten E can give you full MS Office compatibility, Acrobat Reader as well as all the multimedia and organiser stuff. I added a flash card and used it for taking notes at meetings as well as carrying some large techy books round in PDF format.

I don't know if a PDA is the way forward though for what you need, i think any of them will be a struggle for taking a lot of notes. If its occasional notes they're great.

[oracle]

get a tablet pc, thats what im doing cant wait
plus you can just record the lectures

[MikeRox]

Jus waitin for mine to come now, special delivery don't mean special delivery when it goes to Priory Hall, been told to try again after 3pm and yeah, this has built in mic so if I can get the storage on it I'd be able to record the entire lecture if I wanted

[yashiro]

What did you get?

[ascender]

My mate was on about this today funnily enough. He was saying that in this month's PC Pro there's a device featured which is under ?150. Its about the size of a large pager and "clips" to the top of any pad of A4. Not entirely sure how it works, I'm guessing black magic (or possible a sheet of film) but you make your notes in your handwriting as normal on the paper and this device captures them and they can then be downloaded into whatever format you want on your PC.

[Geezer]

I ended up buying the Ipaq RZ1710 for ?130 all in, new and sealed, ?70 cheaper than on the high street
I should have it tomorrow hopefully