Mike…

As far as the operating system, my personal policy is to stick with the most widely used, which now is the Palm OS. Just my choice, I’m sure you can’t go wrong with any of the ones out there. Color is also a terrific feature and as I said, make sure you look at the displays side-by-side when you’re making a decision.

I got a Sony because of the display and the fact that I can get them at a reasonable price (employee discount)… but I’m not a Sony “homer” by any means. Sony makes a lot of top-notch industry-leading products, but they make some not-so-good ones as well. (For example, Sony makes desktops and laptops. Wanna guess what brand of desktop and laptop I have in my office? DELL. They make a better machine, plain and simple, and they are the company standard at Sony!)

The Clie is a terrific item, but it is not without its problems. If you read the reviews at cnet.com, you will notice a user comment that is mentioned with some regularity which is that because of the way the screen is designed dust can get inside and effect the display. It wasn’t something that I was too concerned with, but, depending on how you are going to use yours, it might be a concern for you.

As far as Bluetooth is concerned, I think this brings up a whole different aspect on the problem of buying a PDA now, which is that technology in this area is advancing by leaps and bounds. By this time next year you might be seeing a hand held that includes good wireless system integration and a cell phone and lord only knows what else. And what the Bluetooth article does NOT mention is that current wireless technology is not yet up to par with its wired counterpart… for example, wireless home networking systems’ current data transfer rate is only about 10% of the speed of wired home networking systems. This should improve drastically over the next few years, but you should know that this technology is in its infancy and PDAs will be entirely different machines as this time progresses.

It’s not easy buying a PDA for the same reason it’s not easy buying a computer… you just KNOW that the longer you wait the better machine you’re going to wind up with for the same money, but if you keep waiting you’ll never wind up buying one. But where computers are only getting faster and hard drives bigger, PDAs are even more complicated, because the functionality is advancing for them as well.

Good luck!