Smart phones prove the old adage that there's a sucker born every minute, though every microsecond is a more likely time interval with these things. These Swiss Army Knives of telecommunications pack seemingly endless features into a box just a little bigger than the batteries that power them. They can take pictures, play online or downloaded music, ring with your favourite sounds or songs, display the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, supply stock and weather information as well as news reports, act as GPSes, provide email and instant messaging services, browse the Internet, morph into mini gaming consoles and serve as modems for wirelessly accessing the Internet with other computers.

Sounds great, no? Well, no. The problem for me is (1) their super small size - necessitating numeric keypads instead of alphanumeric keyboards, tiny displays and other Lilliputian features - and (2) the way the telecoms handle the services they provide on these "little wonders." Even the sharpest eyed, most supple fingered and technologically competent individual is going to have a tough time using most of the services these so called "smart phones" afford.

For my life I can't figure out why the phone buying public is falling for smart phones when phone capable PDAs can be so much easier to use and can provide pretty much all of the services available on smart phones. Well, of course I know why - marketing and Microsoft's sluggish efforts to get wireless PDA functionality to work right - but I don't like it. I also don't like the fact that, according to IDC, PDA sales have been falling for the past nine quarters. In the last quarter of 2005 two million units were shipped. In the first quarter of this year only 1.5 million PDAs shipped as compared to almost 2.5 million in the first quarter of 2005.

Join me on the next page as I take a very close look at key issues in the smart phone vs. PDA phone debate: physical size and the constraints size, technology and the way carriers handle services place on the functionality of smart phones. By way of example, I'll talk about two smart phones, both from Motorola, and a Blackberry PDA phone.