Hello all. First post here. Sorry it's a bit long, but i've been researching this stuff for days and not really come up with any good answers. I figure maybe i can get some straight answers from linux people. Usually i'm pretty self-reliant about figuring things out on my own, but the whole cell phone/pda world is really bizarre to me.

I need a device which which i can take field notes and then get them from the device to one of my computers at home either by email or some kind of data transfer by cable. I have been looking at some of the new PDA/cell phones like the Samsung Blackjack, the Motorola Q, the Nokia E62, and they look like they *might* do the trick. For my purposes all it needs is some kind of minimal text editor and a QWERTY keyboard. So my questions are:

Does such a device exist (for some value of $reasonable_money)?

Does it still exist if the computer i would be sending the data to is a linux machine?

Does it still exist if that linux machine doesn't have bluetooth or IR (but it does have USB 2)?

How about if i am too cheap to get a data plan? Do any of the carriers let you do small (text-only email sized) data transfers and just pay for bandwidth without having to pay an extra fee every month? And if you do send email, does it have to be via one of their approved email services, or can you just use your own smpt server on your box at home?

I guess what i'm asking is, what do other linux users do if they want PDA-type devices? Is it even possible to get these things (most of them seem to use Windows Mobile 5 OS) to just do something as simple as send some text data over a USB cable? Does anyone own one of the models above and have any insight?