Recently, I bought a Minstrel cellular modem for use with the Palm Pilot. This is a device which snaps onto the PalmPilot and allows it to talk to wireless data networks throughout North America. More on this in a moment. As PDAs become more capable, and incorporate wireless technology, they'll just become more and more useful. This is a new area, and truthfully, most of the products in this category aren't really ready for prime time.
Cellular phones are good telephones, but they're lousy computers.
We don't recommend using a cell phone in place of a PDA or Palmtop computer, at least now today. One thing these devices do very well though is notify you about incoming email. The phone displays the sender, subject, and first few lines of the message, much like it displays pager messages. You can't reply, and you can't see the entire message, but it's still a useful service. We think this is neat because it makes email, an efficient means of communication, almost as immediate as the telephone.