Graffiti 10 years later.

Good handwriting recognition has been elusive in the PDA market. It was laughable on the Newton. Palm made their users learn an entirely new script. Modern PDAs, like the Apple itouch skip it entirely, even though they have 100s of times more powerful hardware (if not more), and rely on soft keyboards instead.

I was a relatively early adopter of the Palm - my 1st was a b&w Palm 3. Though the onscreen keyboard was clearly quicker to learn, I stuck with graffiti thinking it would eventually be faster. Maybe so, but 10 years latter when I pull out my old handspring visor I find that the onscreen keyboard is at least as fast as my relatively practiced graffiti.

A big part of this is that I still make typos using graffiti. If the software could just catch those few remaining mistakes i think it would beat the keyboard. With all the increase in processing power you would think a modern PDA might be able to do it, too. I doubt we will ever find out, though. The days where you could expect users to learn a new form of handwriting are probably over.

Game boy advance flash cart summary

It's getting a bit hard to find Flash carts for the GBA these days. At the moment Deal Extreme seems to be the only place still selling them at anythink like reasonable prices. You can also use these carts on a NDS to play GBA games, or even NDS games, if you buy a "pass-me" cart as well.

supercard - cheap and fairly good compatibility but has slow ram that can cause problems with some games. Real time save is a nice feature though. http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2734

Ez-Flash IV - more expensive, but works with 100% of the games out there. No real time save, and sometimes you have to mess around a bit to get saving to work at all (see my post on advance wars). This is what I have, and I'm quite happy with it. Enough people own this that there's an excellent FAQ and active user forum. This is good, because the docs that come with the product are quite abysmal. EZ-Flash claims to have stopped making this product on their website but when I emailed them they told me that this is still in production, and that the one sold by deal-extreme is genuine, which is where I purchased mine.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22019