But the ability to mostly browse the web on it was amazing.
Also, if I remember correctly, you could adjust the clock speed to trade off battery life / performance.
It could do a few fairly impressive things, like running emulators as you mentioned. But I think the problem with those was Windows Mobile or Windows CE or whatever they called it at the time. The touchscreens stunk as well.
It was just a crappy scaled-down version of Windows. It was missing the ability to run actual Windows software. It had a browser and a serviceable camera (it helped fulfill my eBay addiction at the time), but it wasn't the same as browsing on a PC.
It probably still wouldn't have been ideal, but within another 2-3 generations it would have been improved/faster and then 'good enough', just like the early iPhones.
You're right that the OS was garbage, further limiting the already limited hardware. I think I also got linux or BSD running and messed around with some WEP cracking in my neighbourhood for a bit, but then it otherwise sat in a drawer.
I was still in school and it was a stupid and expensive purchase, but it did teach me to only get new tech if it was actually useful and otherwise wait, which as served me well since, including the iphone (which the first one was barely adequate for what it promised).
Great devices overall. I've been tempted to pick one of these up for nostalgia purposes. Truly peak PDAs.
For some reason my strongest memory is using it in the dentists office.
My previous device had been a Sony Clie peg-tg50/u (which in some ways was great, but lacking built in WiFi… however I used to save web pages on my laptop and put them on it to read later). But that once fell out of my pocket on a lawn tractor, went through the blades, came out with some nicks but was otherwise fine.
I have fond memories of worms and an rts on that. (The stylus was both great and horrible for that ).
In memory what really was just amazing to me at the time: great fast mp3 player(better on the Sony)
The ability to play videos.
On the dell, the web browser probably wasn’t great, but in my memory I still remembering thinking it was the bees knees. My laptop at the time was a Toshiba Satellite with a pentium 4, 512mbs of ram, and a 16mb GeForce card. Which to me, was pretty darn amazing. (Except for its tendency to every 6-8 months become unable to boot suddenly, needing windows to be reinstalled from Toshibas 4(?) re install discs on an increasingly broken disc drive. This of course was partially more frustrating due to my limited computer skills at that time… which were more comfortable overclocking AMD K6-2s with jumper settings)