Shopping for a PDA for the holidays. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. When it comes to buying a PDA... the first decision is whether to buy one based on the Palm operating system... .or the Windows Pocket PC operating system. On the Palm side... .the best devices are made by Sony and Handspring. Combination Palm OS wireless phones are made by Kyocera and Samsung... .but the best model yet ... Handspring's Treo... probably won't arrive in time for your holiday shopping. It may be worth waiting for. For real techies... .a Pocket PC may be a better choice. The devices have built in pocket editions of Word, Outlook and other applications... and lots of expandability. Compaq's iPaq models have been best sellers... .but the latest from Casio... is hard to beat. Casio's Scott Nelson...

"This is an E 200. It is a 64 meg RAM device. It has an SD slot, compact flash built in. All for about seven ounces." Without a sled, all of that expandability. "Without a sled, all of that expandability. We do offer a PC card sled for anyone that wants that. It doubles as an external battery for your device which doubles your battery life."

The power of the new E-200 packs a price, though, about 599 dollars. If you're on a budget, the best buy around may be another new model from Casio, the BE-300. It is a color Windows CE device, with lots of expandability that sells for under two hundred dollars. The trick is, Casio substituted its own interface for Microsoft's PocketPC. Coming up... .accessories for that PDA. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.