A little bit of the logic behind this table: First off, each table heading is sortable, so if you click any of the table headings you can sort the rows by that criteria. Street price is a rough measure of what I found the lowest price to be online, it may be a little low but is more accurate of what you’ll pay than the list price. Weight is in ounces, memory is in megabytes. The pixels column shows you the total numeber of pixels, which is expressed in the screen dimensions. “MattRating” is a subjective rating of how I think each unit rates as a gift, taking into account all its features, expandibility, the unit in comparison with what else is available, and price.

chart: Buying a combination PDA/Phone, like the popular Treo series, is an entirely different kind of decision than buying a straight PDA. First of all, the prices on these tend to be rediculously high, but very few people pay anything close to the list price because phone companies subsidize the cost of the phone when you sign a contract or as a reward for being a good customer. Since many people are already attached to a particular phone carrier, their choices will be limited by what their company offers. Second, with a PDA/phone purchase, most people want a phone first and a PDA second, which means things like weight and size are more important to the final decision, while those can be compromises in case of a regular PDA, such as the Handspring Prism, which was a hefty unit but very popular because of the features it offered. Finally, battery life is crucial in making a PDA/phone buying decision, and there is no good objective way to quantify battery life in a way that we could compare each unit side by side except with unit testing, and without access to any of the models that can be tricky.