We love gadgets here so I was very interested to peer over Emil's shoulder as he reviewed the Medion Rim1000 ultra-mobile PC. The prospect of computing on the move is always exciting, especially when you spend a lot of time travelling.

Sadly Emil found himself rather frustrated by the poor performance of the Via chip and the tiny keyboard. As I read this I realised that few mobile devices have ever really lived up to their potential. Only two spring to mind, my old Palm Vx and the Psion Series 5 and 7. Neither of these devices are younger than five years old, so why do I have happy memories of these over a Windows Vista based device?

Well, a basic honest of purpose for one thing. The Palm operating system kept the core functions of the PDA really simple to use. I could quickly find contacts and tasks and the Graffiti writing system was great once you got the hang of it. The battery life was amazing, thanks to the monochrome screen, Palm claimed one month and I was never caught short.

I now use a Pocket PC based XDA2 and while I like the colour screen and ability to surf the web, I'm constantly hamstrung by needing to recharge the battery. It's not an entirely fair comparison as the XDA2 has a mobile phone to power whereas the Palm didn't, although I did have a mobile phone adapter for the Palm Vx for a little while.

The answer must be to start using some self restraint when deciding what features to try and include on a device. Programmers are remarkably adaptable when it comes to getting the best from limited resources.

For this reason I'm looking forward to looking at the Palm Foleo, a small device with no ideas above its station. It looks like a great improvement on the Alphasmart Dana concept.