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I was pretty skeptical, too, about PDA+phone devices, until I got the phone I now have -- Samsung's i500 PalmOS phone. I absolutely adore the thing (though it's really way too expensive for what it is).
Some of the problems I was anticipating, such as it being difficult to make an appointment or take down contact info with someone on the phone, are definitely there, but they aren't nearly as much an issue as I was expecting. And getting to HotSync all your contact/calendar information right on to your phone more than makes up for the negatives.
One thing that is really interesting about all of this is that I don't think we are at all moving towards a homogeneous market -- instead, I think convergence means -more- diversity in devices. In addition to devices for one dedicated purpose (taking pictures, playing music talking on the phone, PDA stuff), I think we will see a whole mess of devices that do a mix of these things, focusing on some over others.
For example, my Samsung phone is first a foremost a phone; I have much less interest in a Treo, because the kind of device I want is one that is first of all a good phone, with the more PDAish functionality taking second place. At the same time, I also have an MP3 player, and that is a big enough deal that I can't see myself being happy with the compromise required to integrate the MP3 player with a phone.
I am also curious to see what kinds of ideas people come up with to combine various kinds of functionality in ways that reduce the amount of compromise required. That involves both hardware and software -- I think the usability issues in phones, especially as they gain so much more functionality, is a big area that will need a lot of attention to really make these products accessible to a larger market. That issue is, in fact, one of the motivations behind the Rome stuff we are doing at PalmSource.
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