MagicCap? Anyone?
Newton? Anyone?
USRobotics Pilot?
Pegasus?
Yep, way back in the old days, we were there. Back in the days of 1mb storage cards and 300 baud modems. Take a look at some of those Newton screenshots in wikipedia. Might look somewhat familiar. Of course, that was a funky OS with an even funkier programming language, and back then having a network connection of any kind on a pda was not only just a dream, it wasn't even close to anywhere near possible in the power budget.
The iWhatever is a far better first attempt then I really realized until I got my hands on one, cracked it open, looked at the full blown darwin/*nix OS under the stupid cartoon interface, and realized (like I can only assume much of the MS Mobile, Symbian, and Palm teams) that Apple just deployed a bombshell that was only going to get better. You cannot really appreciate the device playing with it in an apple store. You have to break the locks and get inside (today - very soon not even that) to see what they've actually done.
Really, at this point, the only competition is going to be android, and only because its open source and will run on HTC hardware - HTC being the only ones left standing who can make decent hardware. Microsoft wasted a 7 year head start with no domestic completion other then Palm, and they are going to be in serious catchup mode from now on. They've got Apple sucking up all the "screw this, I just want to use the damn thing... oh and if it were cool that would be nice too" market, and android sucking up all the "anything but Microsoft, oh and we hate Apple too" geeks. That leaves the fortune 500 suits. Good thing there are a lot of those, and they have budgets for this kinda stuff
