I can offer advice on the following:

2. SONY SONY SONY. Sony digital cameras are great and come with lots of features. I believe there's other options now but at the time i bought my camera over the summer, the sony was the only one that could take extended video clips. This was due to a speed limitation of most memory cards, but the Sony Memory Stick is fast enough to keep up with the video. With my DSC-P8 and a 256 MB Memory stick I can take 20 mintues of 640x480 video, including sound (mono).

3. PDA: Hand writing recognition isnt there yet...at least nothing I've seen. I'm partial to PocketPC over Palm because it sync with outlook seemlessly whereas the palm i've never had anything but problems with things like duplication of entries etc.

There are too many books that are great, but don't cover the new stuff as it happens. If you are a computer artist, I suggest getting a subscription to the UK magazine Computer Arts, or Computer Arts Projects(http://www.computerarts.co.uk). Computer Arts highlights whats new in Art software for graphic, vector, and 3D artist. Each issue comes with a CD or two full of demos and free stuff. Computer Arts Projects is my favorite because it comes with some demos and free stuff, but it specializes in project tutorials. Want to learn more about PhotoShop? Maya? 3DStudioMax? Flash? You'll find a little bit of it all in Computer Arts Projects. Subscriptions start at $75 dollars for digital versions that you can download the entire magazine and demo files, to $125 for paper versions that include the files on CD.
For digital cameras, I really like the Nikon cool Pix. 2100, 2MP-$200; 3100, 3MP-$300, 4300 4MP-$400. If all you really want are standard 5x7's 2MegaPixel is plenty, but if you want to go for the 8x10's start at at least 3MP.
I would be willing to adjust to the consensus of Sony, if you also consider getting a Sony Palm device. If you get a Clie, buy a Sony camera too so you can swap your memory between your palm and the camera. The color Clies' will also come with a picture viewer so you can run your pda's battery down instead of the cameras. Be aware though that if you go Sony for your camera, your going to spend more on memory and rechargeable batteries, because most of the higher end Sonys won't use anything but Sony batteries that will run you anywhere from $50-$120+. The Peg-UX40&50 look really cool with the clam shell keyboard, but 600 is a bit much to spend. Go for one of the Peg-tj or sj series and spend your money on the memory, you'll be happier.
The DVD camcorders make me nervous. Think about the skipping issues you can have with your CD player, now make the disk half the size holding 4 times as much and you see why I'm wherry. In truth, tape is a thousand times more sturdy than disk will ever be. Just think where you'll be taking the camcorder, the beach, the ski slope, camping, hiking, aunt Marthas' with the screaming kids and you start to see you really need something robust. If you want to go to dvd that's fine, but get a capture card and some good editing software, and a cheep dvd burner you'll be much happier with the durability and results.
I know it's not a CD/MP3 combo, but if you are going for MP3, I say Archos. I have a Jukebox MultiMedia 20 and I love it. It has a 20 GB hard drive for MP3's, but it also plays small divx files. I've got 3Days of music, 5 feature length films ripped from dvd, and 40 TV shows that I ripped from my ReplayTV, and I still have 3 GB left to transport work files! If you go archos get an AV120 or AV300. (BTW the av300 comes with a camera attachment that is a 3MP digital camera, and it records MPEG-4 videos in QVGA!) If you decide to get a seperate digital camera, the AV120 or 300 can also use attachments to download your photos to the hard disk from your memory card.

Camera: The Nikon's are a surprisingly good digital camera. The Coolpix 5400 is right at your $700 price point and offers 4x optical zoom, image resolution ranging from 640x480 to 2,592 x 1944 (5.26 million pixels native to the CCD,) manual focus (in addition to AF,) will save images in TIFF format, there's no worries of JPEG artifacting. It offers various multi-picture shot modes.

Nikon also sells a selection of lens filters for it, if you're familiar with or used to using them in film photography, as well as converters for external lenses , and it has connections for external speedlights.

It's probably about as close as you can get to a digital SLR camera without spending tons of cash.

PDA: PocketPC. That's really all I have to say. I don't know what you're going to use it for exactly, but I had the little $250 lower-end Viewsonic, and it was a dream. ULTRA-slim, fits right in a pocket, gets amazing battery life. The screen was good and bright. 64 megs on it leave plenty of room for addon software or for keeping documents - and I have to admit, I like Pocket Outlook. I got into the habit of automatically syncing all of my mail over to the PocketPC and just doing it while I was out.

Palm's handwriting recognition is /still/ nowhere near the level of that of the pocket PC. Once I set it for the diagonal angle I write at, it never even had a problem reading /my/ scrawl (a combination of print and script, where about 3/4 of the letters of the alphabet are drawn... well, exactly the same.) People tell me that if they couldn't look at what I was writing contextually, my handwriting would be next to impossible to decypher and it never had a problem. That, and the PocketPC's skinnable, of course. ^_~