I would love to get a palm sized devices today. I think the size, weight and UI were great for everyday. I don't mind it's thick if it means that the battery could be swapped with a connector (!), something almost unheard of today.
I was initially a Newton user. The Newt, for all the snarky lines about its initial HWR, was a really great device, and the size made it (at least for me) a reasonable note-taking platform in meetings and whatnot. But it was big.
When I shifted to the Palm -- which was obviously much smaller, lighter, etc; I could slip it into an inside coat pocket -- I found I was taking notes on a laptop or on paper again. The size made it less appealing to me as a notetaking platform, even though it made it MORE appealing for many other tasks.
I think one of the key ideas of the Palm was that it was supposed to cooperate with the desktop PC rather than compete with it (like the Newton and others tried - and failed - to do). Palm Desktop was a pretty good contact and calendar manager and the palm itself was supposed to be synchronized to what the desktop had. There was a brief period when I used it to answer work e-mails while flying between clients and synchronizing with my laptop from time to time (because the laptop hade the 14400 bps modem).
That simplicity enabled a very to-the-point environment. When Palms started to be able to connect themselves to the internet, a lot of the simplicity was lost. Palm could have gone the way of Danger and offer an online source of truth both PC and PDA would sync to/from, but they never went that way.
