But it wasn't meant to do that!

For the last few years, my second-most invaluable gadget (next to my iMac) has been my Palm Tungsten C PDA. I first got it to help me manage a work project, and it quickly became an invaluable tool spare brain, helping me do everything from managing meetings and coordinating tasks to editing documents and reading e-books.

Naturally, then, when my trusty steed abruptly died of digital old age on Friday, my foremost priority was securing a replacement.

Unfortunately, in the years since I got the Tungsten, the PDA market has been battered around by the ascension of the Blackberry. I simply wanted a PDA with a keyboard, but those were no longer made; everything with a keyboard was a bona-fide smartphone, with an expensive monthly plan I neither needed or wanted. And paying $350+ for a replacement Tungsten seemed foolish; if I'm going to spend that much, I might as well get something more technologically current.

So after a night of frantic research and four hours shopping around, I picked up an Apple iPod Touch. Never mind that I have no urgent need to carry my music and movies around (it's a nice frill, but not an urgent need); the iPod Touch won by being the only non-smartphone keyboard-enabled PDA-functional choice left on the field.

To be honest, while the iPod's multimedia features are awesome (as expected), its productivity and work-related functions are merely basic. There's no native to-do list or task tracker, no portable word processor or spreadsheet app, and no e-book or document reader. There are some web-based programs to do that (and the iPod's built-in Safari browser is awesome), but those are useless if I'm not in a WiFi network -- which is true for 90% of my day. And I wasn't interested in working around the shortcomings with hacks that may break in the future.

So why did I get it? Because Apple has already announced plans to start selling third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch next month. This means -- as sure as tech companies inevitably point due money -- that I will soon have no shortage of third-party productivity (and non-productive) apps to choose from to fulfil my missing PDA functionality needs. Throw in Apple's upcoming MobileMe access-all-your-data-anywhere feature (which I'm already subscribing to under its older name), and the near-term future benefits add up.

At least while I'm waiting for July, at least now I have a nifty new WiFi-enabled, music-playing, photo-browsing, movie-showing, blog-writing iPod to play with. And with the iPod Touch's sexy design, not only have I acquired a new second brain, I've also got a dose of style as well.