E is for exasperating
I find Palm's naming convention confusing, especially for the III family. One thing that helps me to remember that the IIIe is the cost-effective member of the Palm family is by thinking of eMachines, which has captured a position as one of the top five PC manufacturers by virtue of selling its wares for rock-bottom prices. Neither eMachines nor the Palm IIIe will be accused of being at the cutting edge, but both are solid and perform well.

E is not for expandability
The Palm IIIe does not provide any expansion slot or memory upgrade capabilities. It has no flash memory, so the operating system cannot be upgraded beyond the incremental revisions that are normally stored in RAM.

Like the Palm V, the Palm IIIe is not user-upgradable, unless you are intimately familiar with board-level repair and don't mind voiding the warranty. Thus far, I haven't seen any reports of brave souls performing this type of operation, as has been done with the Palm V using something called V8. For more information on the "V8", see my article "Hardware tidbits: Palm V and more" in the April 1999 issue of PalmPower, available at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199904/hotpalm001.html.

E is not for 'everything in the box'
Outlook users will have to note that the Palm IIIe does not include the Pocket Mirror conduit that ships with the Palm IIIx and Palm V. Conduits to HotSync with Outlook can be purchased separately from vendors including Chapura, CompanionLink, DataViz, and Puma Technologies. People that need to HotSync with programs other than Outlook would have to buy a separate conduit anyway, so that's not much of an issue for them.

Another thing that's not included in the box is a spare stylus. My advice? Visit one of the many excellent stylus companies, such as PDA Panache or TTools, get a good replacement stylus, then keep the plastic stylus that came with your IIIe for a spare.