You could get a used iPhone and just not use the phone part. Once it’s jailbroken (now legal in the USA), there’s not really any non-emotional argument for not wanting an Apple product.
Along those lines, I replaced my Sony Clié with an iPod Touch last year. The only thing I really missed about the Clié were two things: no vibration for meeting notices, and no ability to snooze a meeting notice.
Once I got used to universal data access via WIFI, I submitted, and went out and got an iPhone and renewed my four-years-expired AT&T contract.
If you were to opt for a used iPhone that you don’t use as a phone, you could still use it as a 3G-only data device. Just buy a pre-paid 3G modem with SIM, and pop it into your iPhone instead of the modem.
Holy cow - I didn’t know about the emulator but here it is:
Might just have to give this a try for our grocery-shopping application - it can’t run any slower than the iPod-native one we’ve been attempting to use! (Splash Shopper - which is the only one that offers the ability to track groceries by aisle in multiple stores; a lot of power-users like us have reported intolerable performance problems with that).
From my Palm Tungsten I moved to an HP iPAQ. Very good choice for a standalone PDA and meets all your requirements. Seamless integration to Outlook. Has Excel and Word versions on board.
I would consider a smartphone but my carrier is Verizon and if you get a Blackberry they require you to get a $30/mo. data plan with it.
My dad just uses an old blackberry, one that the phone service can’t even activate. There’s no reason you can’t get the phone, but not use it as one. And you’re more likely to be able to find refurbished ones, as people tend to get rid of their phones more often.
People who just want PDAs without phones are rarer, and thus the price is often higher.
One caveat about the Blackberries: They didn’t start putting very much internal space in them until recently. This isn’t much of a problem for storing data since you can put MicroSD cards in them to expand the storage, but at least with my crackberry, I can only install apps in the tiny 96MBs of on-board storage for some reason (then again, my Blackberry is old enough not to have Wi-Fi, if you get one of the newer Wi-Fi enabled Blackberries, they might have more internal storage space).