Well, I voted for a Palm. I was so happy with my first one, that when it died, I did a huge amount of comparing and shopping around . . . and finally bought another Palm.
But there are so MANY options now! And one can buy keyboards for them, if one plans to use them for a lot of writing, Yvonne. Although I find the onscreen keyboard very comfortable to use, once I got used to it.
For me, the greatest advantage of my Palm over a paper equivalent lies in its abilities to copy and sort. (The games I have on it -- and now the fic I read on it -- are a pleasant bonus.
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Copy: That is, I could give it my schedule for a particular Monday, tell it each class was a repeating occurence up until a certain date (or with no end-date, if I preferred), and have all my classes for the year scheduled. Any holidays or other exceptions, I could delete and tell it that only that one day should be affected. When my classes got fiddled with halfway through the year, I only had to change it once, tell it to apply to all future occurrences, and voila.
Sort: I can find people in my phone/address book by name or anything else, move them around from category to category with ease, create new categories easily, etc., etc. Paper listings get crumpled, torn, must have things erased, run out of space . . . and the "find" command when I am trying to remember WHO it is I know who lives in Culver City (for example), doesn't work with a paper one.
As for standing up to Superstrength, heavy-duty cases are readily available for all the common models. Sadly, I doubt any screen or stylus would -- and they are all made of very similar polymers, with no one brand having much of an advantage.
Perhaps StarLabs can come up with something.