That's a very thorough overview Rich, and you might want to add that Outlook Express itself is being deprecated by Microsoft
(something we are all used to
) and being replaced by Windows Live Mail as part of the Windows Live Essentials pack.
As for my own H/PCs I've given up synchronizing them now, and only use them when I have WiFi access, mainly for PIM access, email checking and reading RSS feeds at home. To that end the
mobile version of MSN works well in the IE6 browser, as do the
mobile versions of Google and the newly relaunched and really quite good looking
Yahoo! mobile. Mobile Hotmail even displays HTML emails. Of course, you have no access to any of your PIM data when there is no internet connection, so this is not a good solution for everyone, but it suits me very well.
Yes, my phone can do all the above, but it is wonderful to have the huge screen and a proper keyboard with which to bang out emails, and not have to fire up the PC to do so.