I wanted a mobile PC to carry with me at university without having to lug a Laptop, and one I could use standing/riding on public transportation.

After a few months of researching the best Sharp Zaurus to load debian on... Nokia announded the N770 and made my task much easier, and more rewarding for me
I pre-ordered one at full launch price (350usd, still much more affordable than a PC) and had web, an x-term, gcc, mplayer, pdf, and ebook reader on my person, all-day-every-day - and this was winter of 2005.

At the time I was using a Nokia 6010 bar phone, switched to a Motorola flip-phone with bluetooth, camera, and to tether with the Internet Tablet(smaller/lighter to carry,
when the motorola broke in half, picked up a Nokia 2760.

I saw a handful of people with Compaq or HP windows-phones, later the HTC-variant Windows OS, but was already computing circles around them and began to see 2-3 other people around campus with N800 or N810-WiMax editions.

Upgraded to N810 after sitting on a table-edge with N770 in my back pocket one time too many, and cracked the screen quite badly. Upgraded to N900 nearly a year after it launched only because I began working more than half-time a location with a no-wifi security policy and intollerable EDGE reception.

And that's when I entered the world of only carrying one device, faster mobile computing, and irritating 9-hour battery life thanks to 3G data (bt was bad, but not 3G bad).