I had a Palm Zire 72 which I used while I was selling cars over the summer, it was useful for writing down stock numbers, tracking customer contacts, etc. But as a student I have no use for it so I sold it on ebay.

But, if you like to have lots of reading material at the ready, check out AvantGo. Lots of websites have "channels" which provide a bunch of content and each time you hotsync it updates the articles and such. So you can ward off boredom a bit with that.