What seem particularly notable to me about these kinds of optical illusions is that they demonstrate some kind of infinity within a finite space, usually by appearing to violate some fundamental law of the universe. The violation is misdirection, of course, but nevertheless effective. So what's the verbal equivalent? It seems to be much easier to represent loops in the two dimensional visual space then it is in the one dimensional verbal space.

Right now, I'm kind of leaning towards Who's On First or the classic Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck argument over whether it's Duck Season or Rabbit Season. Still, I don't feel like these really capture the essence of really tripping up the observer, not just the fictional participants. (OK, maybe Who's On First does this to an adequate degree.)

Palm's main failure was that they sat on their damn laurels and failed to innovate. I was a happy Palm owner for several years. Then I started to yearn for a bigger screen, the ability to use a CF card to interoperate with my camera, and better I/O capabilities. And the only place to get that was the Pocket PC. In retrospect, it was a dumb move -- the Pocket PC is so much less functional that I don't actually use the features I thought I would.

So what do I use? Two things:

• First, I love Pocket Excel. I used to use Pocket Money to keep track of expenses, but it didn't have any budgeting or analysis tools, and it was prone to data corruption if you were nutty enough to synchronize while the desktop version of Money was running. Oh, crazy user! (Again, a nice idea that turned out to be a pain in the ass to use.) So, instead, I've evolved an extremely handy budget spreadsheet in Pocket Excel that I can carry with me.
  Interestingly enough, the key aspect of this is not mobility, but the fact that the Pocket PC is like an extremely portable window. I usually only use the spreadsheet while I'm sitting down at my computer using Money. I enter receipts into Money and into the Pocket PC (like double-entry bookkeeping), and check the results against each other.
• Audible.com. Along with NetFlix, it's one of the few dot-coms that actually deserves to make money (and probably isn't). I love to listen to audio books, and I love how cheap they are from Audible. I download them into my Pocket PC, hook it up to my car stereo, and listen to books while I drive.

By contrast, the iPod looks completely forgettable on paper. "Five gig drive? So what? Archos has a freakin' 20GB model for even cheaper!" "So it's small; they're all small!" "Firewire? So what?" This completely belies the out-of-the-box experience though. While the small hard drive size is regrettable, it's about the only tradeoff in the machine, and that sacrifice allows for the critically important small form factor. Plugging it in just works, and synchronization takes about 10 minutes for 5GB of data (whereas my serial-port hobbled Pocket PC takes 2 hours for 30MB worth of data). The small size is just right; it's hard to describe without holding one, but anything larger (like the Archos, or for that matter the Pocket PC) suddenly feels awkward by comparision. (Palm also got the form factor just right, even if they did compromise on the screen.) The jog dial feels responsive -- the acceleration actually makes it possible to navigate a list of 900 songs without getting irritated. Frankly, my only complaint is that it doesn't appear to be possible to toggle shuffle mode without going through several levels of menus.

Getting the details right is always the key to the user experience. Microsoft's done it before -- the introduction of the context menu in Windows 95 (and the fact that you could thus change your screen resolution by getting the context menu for the desktop) is a great example. In fact, that alone was sufficient to drag me from Apple to Microsoft. But whatever lessons they learned there, they didn't apply to the Pocket PC.