I have recently decided to purchase a new pda and have been looking specifically at the Axim x51v, the x50v and the asus a730. The I like the axims because they have the processing powert to emulate PS1 and the power to handle future games. The x51v has WM5 built in where as the x50v has WM2003SE and can upgrade to WM5. Now I have heard that WM5 is buggy and not many things work now, so I am wondering if I get the 51 what problems are there with WM5 , and are any of them fatal?

wm5 is buggy ihave had two x51v pda's both have had problems.
the problems are 1. unit will not power up 2. unit does not recognize the cf card. both problems are fixed (temporarily)
with a soft reset. dell has released a rom update to deal with these issues but it does not work. word from dell is these problems only happen with cf card in the unit. a new rom update
is supposed to be released soon.

The major thing out of the box that does not seem to work is Bluetooth -- at least the Axim version of WM5 does not have profiles for much of anything in its stack.

As for other functionality...I think it depends on your third party software needs. Without third party software, WM5 seems pretty stable to me. Although I have had similar issues with crashing and requiring a soft reset when I installed the wrong software, with a minimum of 3P software (Adobe Acrobat, Total Commander, TCPMP), I have not had these issues at all. Also the CF card that's in my Axim stays in there, and is consistently recognized, and has never disappeared. I'm on rom A01, actually... I don't have any immediate reason to upgrade, at least until the BT issues get fixed or some other functionality gets added.

But there are a *wide* range of relatively simple third party apps that completely screw things up in WM5. So if you want to run 'em, you want 2003. My understanding is that a final release WM5 SDK isn't really available yet, and it's going to be a while before this gets resolved.