Uses and Software for a Modern PocketPC PDA?

Deviant asks: "I just bought a new Dell Axim X30 with 802.11b and Bluetooth. It was a bit of an impulse buy and now I find myself trying to find out what I can do with it and what software is 'must have' for the platform. I work in IT for a bank where I have wireless available in the office and I am also a part-time education student. I got it primarily for basic PDA things like a calendar, a To-do list, e-mail/IM, taking notes, and am looking forward to getting a few good games for it. I guess my question is to Slashdot readers with MS Windows Mobile based PDAs: What software do you use daily that makes your PDA worth while for you? What uses are there for this that I may not have thought of?"

e-books

[hcdejong]

Load some e-books onto it to kill time when you're traveling, waiting in line, compiling, etc.

My experience

[hey!]

I'm a PocketPC develper. Our customers use PDAs for field data collection, not personal productivity.

I do carry a (palm) PDA though, which I use for recording time spent on various projects and expenses. However, since I also carry a laptop, I find the PDA is not much of a personal productivity tool for me. A PDA is a basically a waste if you carry a laptop.

That said, the one thing where I find the PDA functionality of my treo phone very convenient is reading ebooks. Since I basically use nearly all my free time reading, it's very convenient to be able to carry a small library on an SD card. I use the excellent open source weaselreader program, which is unfortunately, palm only. I don't know of any good OSS pocketpc readers, but Microsoft's Microsoft Reader is a very good ebook program IMO. You can find a lot of free .lit files on the internet, and there are some free-as-in-beer tools for converting HTML or RTF to .lit, so it shouldn't be hard to raid the Gutenberg library and with the help of a text to html tool and and html to lit tool be up and running on your pcketpc.

This sure is shiny, what can I do with it?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you give it to someone who could actually use it for something useful, but couldn't afford to drop half a mortgage payment on an impulse purchase?

Re:needless consumerism

[Monkelectric]

Right, becuase having *anything* that isn't strictly necessary is stealing from the mouths of some poor person in a far off country whom the money could better serve. Except the money is stolen regardless by corrupt government officials (Im looking at you, UN) so ... really ... your stealing from government officals?