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If you want to geek out a bit and program Lua on your Palm, you may do so: http://netpage.em.com.br/mmand/plua.htm

Unless you are willing to commit to an expensive flukey online service your PDA will forever remain an appendage to your PC.

With all due respect, even my little m105 with its stock PalmOS 3.5 can use standard PPP and a V.90 clipmodem to connect to my normal ISP, and I can use telnet to read my mail in Pine(!) via the unix shell and Xiino locally on the PDA to do web surfing.

No additional expense at all, and the software I use (pTelnet and Xiino) is actually pretty decent for what it does.

Since I have a pair of m105's and a pair of 8MB Northstar MemorySafe flash modules, I don't even back up my Palms to my PC anymore.

Lua is spectacularly elegant. A functional language just as powerful as any other, but very simple and readable.
Also has a powerful alternative to object programming.

As an introduction to progamming, PDA programming is a good start, because small programs can be useful on these. is a Lua implementation for Palm with a simple and effective integrated UI language that is all thoughtfully designed.

encapsulation warns me when I make assumptions about how an interface is implemented (which could change)

Our programs manipulate our data. The libraries we use to transform/manipulate our data should return it to us for our safekeeping. The bank account object you provide for me could lose its withdraw and balance methods, essentially not only allowing me to lose useful functionality (withdraw), but also the main data/information (balance). Your interface implementation could be changed, but not necessarily to my benefit.

Beyond that, though, is the tedium and drudgery of crafting classes and implementing interfaces, which repetitively takes a lot of lines of code to accomplish fairly little.

As for Lua, we already had a surplus of untyped scripting languages (Python, ECMAScript, Perl, Tcl, Ruby). I wish they'd put that effort into something truly novel.

There's an extra level of elegance to Lua, even over python and ruby. It's a bit faster and a lot smaller than the others, and there is a nice implementation on palms Plua

For Java: Superwaba
For C: OnBoardC
For Lua: Lua
These are the environments I use and have lots of success with. There is also Pocket C, but I prefer ONBoardC as it is is free and generally works better.

Yup, I believe most Palm's will work (at least the older ones). You just need the cable. I'm betting similar solutions exist for any of the linux based handhelds also.
Several PalmOS terminal programs
Free one
linux specific article
More non-free software

BTW: The best scripting langugae I've found so far is Lua. The Palm port, Plua, is quite solid.

I have a Sprint PCS Touchpoint 120 and it's pretty nifty. It handles the essential phone basics very well - a reasonable battery life and good coverage around town and the city (town = Boulder, CO, city = Denver). The signal easily gets lost if I go up into the mountains, but that's to be expected. I am a little wary of their billing / web ordering process though - when I signed up they accidentally created two accounts in my name and billed me an extra $50 that I didn't owe before they eventually got it sorted out. Finally, their web site is also often overloaded if you want to check or pay your account online.

The WAP features were quite a fun toy for the first week or so, but you can't really do any serious stuff with 6 lines of text. I find myself using it occasionally to check my email and get movie times when I'm outside (one of the dangers of being in Boulder, I suppose). Look on Yahoo! for a WAP directory. Note that sending mail is possible but requires much patience, and there is no direct POP3/SMTP support (web email like Yahoo! works just fine). It has a secure WAP implementation of some sort, so you can happily buy stuff online from anywhere. The phone also has some basic PIM features, but I largely ignore them as I also have a Palm. I think I could plug my Palm into this phone and get online that way, but I've not yet had the urge to try.

In short: I love this phone. As long as you don't want the world, you should be fine with whatever Sprint WAP-enabled phone takes your fancy. You mention the NP1000 - I had a look at one in the store and I didn't like it. Sure, it has a larger screen - but it looked suspiciously fragile, and it was only single band (ie: no analog roaming).

I did find some reviews on Epinions, so go have a read. There was a mobile phone section up on the Deja.com buying forums, but they're gone now that Deja has reverted to being a usenet feed (yay!).

If you primarily need a new mobile phone - get one and enjoy WAP as a toy. If you need full web access (or if the phrase: "mobile ssh or telnet client" starts you drooling), get a VisorPhone (or wireless Palm if you don't mind not being able to make voice calls) - but the monthly subscription fee might be astronomical compared to the 1500-minute per month holiday offers I've seen Sprint pushing recently.

So was PalmOS.

For example, the email program I use on my MP 2100 uses the standard contact information for getting its email addresses, and is treated by the system as simply another way to get information in and out of the system.

Again, PalmOS does this too.

The NewtonOS has a full TCP/IP stack, with communications being done over Ethernet, or PPP. The email, browser, ftp, irc, telnet, ect.. clients all use the standard protocols, and you can download new packages directly off of the 'net.

Once again, I do this with my palm. TCP/IP and PPP are built into the OS. While the applications you mentioned are not bundled with PalmOS, there are a wealth of them available for free.

With my Palm, I snap on a modem, plug in a phone line, and connect PPP to earthlink. Then I can check/send email (Eudora), "surf" the web (EudoraWeb, AvantGo, others), get on IRC, use AIM, use Yahoo! Messenger, and can telnet. All these clients use their respective "standard protocol."

I'm not saying the Newton isn't a great machine. Just that you're choices aren't as limited as you think.

wishus
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I like ptelnet (formerly known as PalmTelnet). I have used it to connect to headless Linux boxes that are running agetty on their serial ports. It can also connect via the TCP/IP stack which is handy too.

Another alternative is to use a telnet client. ptelnet is free and works very well. I've been using it while on travel to telnet in and use pine for e-mail. I have a keyboard which helps a lot, but you can be functional with the stylus if you have to be.

I highly reccomend a Palm for this application simply because there's no point in having color for serial interfacing. With that in mind you'll get way better battery life out of a Palm. There are plenty of good serial apps for PalmOS; I use ptelnet and it's great. Using handwriting rec can be arduous, especially if you do a lot of tabs for command line completion (IOS has this IIRC), but a foldable keyboard would pretty much solve this problem.

As for the Hotsync cradle problem, you can buy a Hotsync cable here for 20 bucks which has just a serial connector on one side and the proprietary connector on the other. It's way, way easier to use than a cradle for things like this because you can hold the Palm in your hand and still write.

This has been my setup and it's worked perfectly. For anyone out there who has a Palm laying around and wants to full with this, just stick a getty on a com port, download a serial program for the Palm, and login to your box. It's kind of cool :)

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