Since a lot of the users reading this Palm/Garnet forum are past Palm users, I thought this might be a good group to give me some feedback.
My brother-in-law has an *old* Handspring that finally gave out, so he is in the market for a new device. He is considering the Palm TX. I have suggested that he look into the iPod Touch and the N800, but the N800 is no longer available new in most places. I thought the iPod Touch might be easier for him to use, but I'm not sure how great the PIM features of it are.

Some info about him: He lives in Canada, used his old Palm mostly for calendar and contacts, uses Skype a lot on his laptop (this is one reason I suggested the N800). He seems a little ambivalent about using the wifi/web capability of the Palm, but I could see it being useful for him (he's an academic and spends a lot of time on campus where there is wifi, and in coffee shops with wifi)

I hope this isn't too off topic for this forum and I appreciate your thoughts.

If he is willing to learn the it interface it sounds like he might enjoy it the most. If he likes uber shiny get an ipod touch. he he i had to fix one and i make sure it took me a "whole week" lol, its fun.

If he uses it for PIM (calendar, task, notes, contacts) AND he syncs to PC, you might want to steer him off NIT for now. Or introduce him to GVM on the NIT...

iPhone will be getting quite a bit of boost to its PIM options soon, as the Windows Mobile , OSX and Palm favorite apps are being ported there (Pocket Informant, Agendus, Omnifocus mobile, and more) and should be available after July 11th.

In either case, if he _depends_ on PIM functions for day to day work, it may not be a bad idea to get a used machine to use for the next 1-3 months (Maybe a Palm TX or Treo) just so he can keep his grooves on while affording more time to decide for just a little extra cost.

Depends really on the usage. Here's a quickie summary of the focuses of each device:

N800/N810: basically Internet focued, developer-centric in terms of interface design and tweakability.

TX: PIM (personal information management) is the best of the three; some multimedia focus, not as great on the web browsing side, but suitable for some things. Nice battery life given its age in compairson to the other devices.

iPod Touch: music and web focused. Moreso of a consumer device. Kinda like a Palm TX 2.0 in a lot of respects. Between jailbreaking and the upcoming iPhone 2.0 firmware, there are ways to add 3rd party applications that are quite nice. Right now, its not very good for PIM functions, but that will totally change when the new firmware comes and the apps come with it (many Palm OS 3rd party application developers are porting their software to the iPhone/iPod Touch including PIM software).

I would tell the person to wait as long as possible, and then weigh it like this: iPod Touch over the N800/N810 with the TX as a last ditch backup if the other two really are too over the head for usage.

If he's mostly using PIM functions, then Palm wins, no contest. Palm has always had the best of that, by far, because that's what the PalmOS was built for. The Nokia pales in comparison, and while I haven't used a Touch, I doubt it will be able to compete well in that area either. For web browsing, the Nokia wins easily, but for PIMs it can't compete.

I'm pretty satisfied with Garnet for PIMs at this point, but I really wanted the other capabilities that the NIT allowed, including the keyboard.

My husband uses a Palm TX and really loves it.

Also, the N800/810 can run the Garnet VM, don't forget that

If he wants to listen to audiobooks or podcasts, I would steer him away from the Nokia for now. At present there are no media players on the N8xx with a resume or bookmark function and The Garnet VM does not run Pocket Tunes. I have no idea what the Ipod does in this regard.

If this is important to you, please vote for maemo Bug # 1129.

If you don't mind managing your media with iTunes (personally I don't mind, you can easily copy them back out to mp3\aac as necessary anyway), it supports Audiobook bookmarking and can manage audiobooks separately from your music.