I’ve got 3 pieces of software I’m using on my iPAQ hx2495:
For email, I use the free QMail3. No, I don’t read Japanese, I used the Japanese Excite’s translation.
I use Battery Pack Pro from Omega One for shortcuts and to beef up my Today screen capabilities.
I use Pocket Weather from SBSH Mobile Software to get weather reports for various places I’m interested in.
Why did I choose the products I did? Well, for email, it seems that the other applications I tried out either did IMAP poorly or mostly functioned in an offline mode, encouraging me to connect, download headers, disconnect, mark the messages I wanted to read, connect, download bodies, disconnect, mark the messages I wanted to delete or move, connect, synchronize and disconnect. That may’ve been the way to work 10 years ago when connectivity was mostly over dial-up but, nowadays, I’m almost always connected via WiFi, so I wanted something that was closer in operation to usual my desktop client, Thunderbird. QMail3 fills the bill.
For weather, I tried several, including the free ADB Weather Plus from Happy Jack Road. I would’ve been satisfied with the free client but, for some reason it has problems parsing the reports from the National Weather Service.
And Battery Pack Pro … well, I just like it.
All told, this stuff cost me less than $30.