Hey Bow:

I use a treo (palm os) with a third party app (pTunes) and cheapo-kingston SD cards to accomplish pretty much the same effect as the 'best' mp3 players. pTunes supports the Ogg Vorbis file format, which with a good encoder is very accurrate at sampling rates as low as 96kps (variable encoding rate)... Given that you are listening through headphones and 'on the go', you can even get away with smaller file sizes. My experience with mp3 is that below 128 is 'no go'. So with Vorbis on a Phone/PDA, you don't really need a MP3 player.

My Life with Treo-Palm:
Despite some of the genuine frustrations with the antiquated Palm Garnet OS- its fast, almost always on, stable-with-some-tweaks, has more third-party apps than you can find on any other platform... etc. My Treo basically does everyting. It even has an ssh client with which I can 'drive' servers securely from just about anywhere in North America. I've even posted code patches to production software from the passenger seat of a car in the middle of an interstate.

Here is everytrhing I can do with my Palm out-of-the-box with maybe 40 bucks of software and SD cards:
-Email
-Edit office docs
-Just about anything you can do on the WWW
-ssh to a server (which hosts many 'special scripts' that I run from my plam ssh client, like one that checks my projects out of the repo, compiles them, and does basic code quality checks, like JUnit tests and javadoc, and tells me who made what change) and do anything I want from the Linux command line (network security, software, MySQL database, etc etc etc)
-edit software or scripts on said server
-Flash my .ogg collection to 2 gb SDram (treo 755 I hear can address 8 gb sd cards!)
-Plug my Treo into anything with a Jack input to play my music
-adequate camera (have the 650, its not a really good camera, just adequate)

Here is what I can do currently, or will be doing shortly with add-ons:
Motorolla S9 bluetooth headphones for playing my music wirelessly at the gym.
Take calls and control music w/blutooth A2dp headset
Out-board GPS receiver bluetooth'd to phone to run tomtom w/vocal directions.
Set up voice-commands to launch apps or call friends.

The later treo models have wireless cards, but I really don't see the point.

Until someone finally implements a 'PAN' (personal area network) where PDA screens (or even better, PDA Heads-Up-Displays), PDA keyboards and Cell phones are all very small, discrete foldable/rollable devices wirelessly (bluetooth) networked to a main CPU 'pocket server' (think something the size of a pack of smokes that just has the), then I think the latest lines of smartphones (Treo, Q, etc) are about as good as we're going to get.

I want the PAN because it means I can cary as much gadgetry as I need- going out on a date? Just take my phone 'client' and the pocket server. Going to a conference? Get all the gear tucked away, because I'll need it, and grab my gps reciever too, so I can find my way there. Going to work, where I'll have a computer? take what I need there. Plus people can buy what clients they need/can afford. And if they all implement some IEEE-esque standard, then there will be lots of consumer choices for every element of the network.

and yeah, whole new frontiers of data security/insecurity....

In a VERY clumsy way, I think the Palm Foleo is an attempt at some sort of implementation of PAN.

But I think smartphones don't have too much future in them without a form-factor 'paradigm shift'. Even if you can cram that much capability into a phone-sized widget AND get good battery life AND durability- there is just a hard limit to micro-keyboards and itsy-bitsy displays.