Okay, from searching history (this group and sci.lang.japan), this topic  
is pretty common, but I can't specifically find the information I am  
looking for (either from googling or searching usenet). There is a lot of  
information out there (like greggman's excellent page) but much of it  
seems out of date. Hopefully no one will scream at me for posting to this  
group on this topic. I imagine those of you who don't care about PDAs hate  
these posts and those of you who do may be bored by it by now.

I want a PDA for the same reason other students of Japanese want them --  
kanji lookup, portable dictionaries and flashcard/drilling programs (and  
also to write things I see/hear during the day down). My original plan was  
to buy a WinCE based device (or whatever they are calling that OS now)  
after having a look at it in operation. I could then load JFC (and maybe  
JWPce).

However, after walking around Akihabara and going to every pasokon shop  
(besides the 中古店), it seems like the stores only sell the Sharp Zaurus  
models, except one place sold some HP models (and might have been able to  
order many others, but I want to play with it before I buy). Unfortunately  
I fell in love (immediately) with the kanji input. The zaurus even  
recognized my really bad semi-cursive (seems all I had to do was scribble  
in the right order and in approximately the right directions and it  
figured it out). So I have to have one now. :)

I am tempted to just get the Zaurus (SL-C1000 or equivalent higher end  
models with hard drive). They are gorgeous little machines. But I'm not  
sure about flashcard programs (everything that talks about Zaurus online &  
flashcard programs are for older models -- often before the change to  
Linux). Has anyone hear used one of the newer Zaurus? Specifically, how  
was it for english speaker learning japanese?

Related questions:
        - why do there not seem to be a lot of PDAs on display at the stores? It  
seems like only the new Zaurus are being sold at all. :)
        - Is the PDA market dead in Japan? Everyone using cellphones instead?
        - Are there other stores I should be looking at? (I am thinking of going  
to Shinjuku sometime too for comparison and would go anywhere in Tokyo to  
look...).
        - Of the newer models of WinCE based devices, are there any that stand  
out? The only one I've looked at is the HP iPAQ rx3715 which is heavily  
based towards multimedia stuff.

Rachael