Best of all, I can use all of the peripherals, cases, and accessories I've accumulated over the years. On that note, I fervently hope that Palm stays true to their word about standardizing on the Universal connector built into the Palm m500 series handhelds. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of buying new stuff all the time. Besides, there aren't any travel chargers or adapters available right now that will let me connect a Palm m505 or a Clie to Palm III peripherals.

Plus, the AutoCF and Backup software included with the HandEra make it much easier to deal with external storage than the utilities provided with the Palm m505. I haven't played with the CLIE PEG-N710C much yet, so I can't comment on the utilities Sony provides, although perusal of the discussion boards and lists I frequent seems to indicate there are better third-party utilities available.

Two expansion slots
HandEra supports both a CF (CompactFlash) slot and a Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard slot, which is much preferable to Sony's proprietary Memory Stick technology. I have a bunch of MultiMediaCards that came with an MP3 player I won, so I'm looking forward to recycling those, since I never did use that MP3 player much. Besides, the CF slot opens up a whole new range of possibilities. For example, a CF modem would allow me to connect to the Internet while using my Palm Portable Keyboard. Better still, a CF Ethernet card would just about let me ditch my laptop (too bad the drivers are for that other operating system). And, I can back all my stuff up to one of those 16MB MultiMediaCards I have, with plenty of room to spare. Having all these options is a good thing.

Your desires granted
HandEra has responded to a lot of comments I've seen on the Pilot mailing list by including a soft Graffiti area, higher screen resolution, screen rotation, louder alarms, voice recording, the ability to use an AC adapter, DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency) dialing of numbers stored in the Address Book, and a reset hole that doesn't require unscrewing the stylus. They've also shown their attention to the concerns of users by getting rid of the springs in the battery compartment, keeping the stylus silo completely away from the display cable, returning to the classic PalmPilot-style backlight, and so on.

About the only thing not included in the package is a copy of FlashPack (at http://www.handera.com/products/cat-flashpack.asp). I surmise HandEra figures that utility is no longer needed in an environment where you have two different storage systems to use, both of which are nonvolatile and can go up to 128MB. I still want to put particular applications in Flash, like DateBk4 (at http://www.pimlicosoftware.com) and MultiMail Pro III (at http://www.actualsoft.com). Also, FlashPack provides a way to take a snapshot of the databases you specify and automatically back them up to Flash. If you've ever been stuck having to do a hard reset without having synchronized recently, FlashPack really comes in handy.