What should I buy please?

I know nothing of PDA devices so apologies for this post in advance! My entire working life has been spent maintaining modest sized networks and desktop/portable PCs.

Presently I use a Thinkpad for Email (Outlook 2k) and Internet (IE6) with MS Office 2K used primarily for Excel and Word documents.

The thinkpad is great, but its too big and heavy to take on a forthcoming trip abroad as I am away for a long time and will have to make numerous plane flights.

Is there a PDA that I could buy which would offer me the ability to do the following:-

a) Extract a selection of emails and contacts from Outlook.
b) Send/Receive Email via WIFI
c) Send/Receive Email via dial up Modem
d) (less important) Send/Receive Email via 10/100 ethernet
e) surf the 'Net via any one of the above
f) Allow me to hold a selection of word/excel documents

Thanks in advance for any suggestions. I'd rather buy something thats "too big" than "just big enough" if I am going to make the purchase.

[Martin Laverty]

I would look at these models.

Palm Life Drive
http://www.totalpda.co.uk/Palm-Lifedrive-Showtime.aspx

Tx
http://www.totalpda.co.uk/Palm-Tungsten-TX.aspx

Hp 2410
http://www.totalpda.co.uk/HP-iPAQ-2490--NEW.aspx

2750
http://www.totalpda.co.uk/HP-iPAQ-2750--New.aspx

They will cover what your looking for. For C you will need a bluetooth mobile phone. For D you will need to be connected to a pc on the network. I dont recall seeing anything that will let you connect a PDA directly to a network card.

Although the palms have a different OS they are fully compatible with windows. The new Windows Mobile 5 on the two HPs has copied quite a few features from the Palm OS. Top tip would be the lifedrive since you can watch films/play music on it while your flying out and it will do all your work since it has a 4Gig hard drive. If you want to give me a call i can go ver these in a bit more detail for you.

Originally Posted by peterb

I know nothing of PDA devices so apologies for this post in advance! My entire working life has been spent maintaining modest sized networks and desktop/portable PCs.

Presently I use a Thinkpad for Email (Outlook 2k) and Internet (IE6) with MS Office 2K used primarily for Excel and Word documents.

The thinkpad is great, but its too big and heavy to take on a forthcoming trip abroad as I am away for a long time and will have to make numerous plane flights.

Is there a PDA that I could buy which would offer me the ability to do the following:-

a) Extract a selection of emails and contacts from Outlook.
b) Send/Receive Email via WIFI
c) Send/Receive Email via dial up Modem
d) (less important) Send/Receive Email via 10/100 ethernet
e) surf the 'Net via any one of the above
f) Allow me to hold a selection of word/excel documents

Thanks in advance for any suggestions. I'd rather buy something thats "too big" than "just big enough" if I am going to make the purchase.

Thank you Martin.

I will have a look at those in due course.