I would like to buy a PDA/smartphone. Which model has the best combination of features & signal reception?

Signal reception is a hard one to predict, most are pretty good nowadays. As a longtime PocketPC Phone Edition user (had the first T-Mobile version), I would recommend the Samsung version available at Verzion (Samsung SCH-i730). Not only does it look good, it's a decent sized screen compared to the others and the slide out keyboard that *everyone* seems to be including nowadays (I hate it on all of them, btw, because it bulks up the phone size) is better on this one. Reason being it allows you to use your thumbs rather then hunting and pecking with a QWERTY keyboard like the T-Mobile MDA, etc.

It does not have a built in camera which is an oversight by samsung, but who cares...unless you are a teenager and really need to take pictures every five seconds of butterflies and text them to your group.

Unfortunatley, the screen size of most PPC PE's are really small compared to the original versions (imagine any of the current Mobile editions without the phone and there you go).

Good luck and play around with all of them...you need to try them out in the store as if you are going to use it in real life...this is the key.

if your looking for windows mobile i would go with the palm treo 700 w or wx which ever your service provider carries. the palm smartphones are the best out there right now and they do everything. if you want to take a chance go with the 700p this is strickly palm os (no windows) but you can download programs onto the phone to make it run just like windows.

either way you buy a palm product and you get a fully customizable phone (you can download every program you can think of onto these machines) the windows mobile palm 700w or wx is fairly new so it wont have as many programs available but they add new ones often. the 700p has millions of programs.

so go with a treo

The Palm Treo 650 tops every review i've seen. The prices are going down slightly on the 650 now that the 700 is out.

Here's a review for the new Treo 680 ...

http://shop.pcmag.com/article/Palm+Treo+680/194593...

Two Good Brands are either The Treo with either Sprint or T-Mobile or one of the Newew BlackBerry's or Pocket PC's for Sprint