Hi,
I posted this on another (inferior!) site, but no one would give me an answer specific to the PDA I am ACTUALLY asking about.

Hopefully someone here can give me an answer regarding my Compaq IPAQ 3970 - I am sure the answer must be in the technical DATA somewhere, but I cannot find it. Even if I did it might as well be in Chinese!!

Thanks in advance!

I have an old Compaq Ipaq 3970 which I allowed to discharge and lost all the data.
I sent it to a Data Recovery Company to see if any recovery was possible, they came back and said it was not possible:
'This device uses ram flash memory therefore as soon as the power is lost all data is lost and does not exist to be recovered'
CONCLUSION: No recovery possible

However my IT guy in the Office said that apparently the Conclusion is a contradiction RAM would normally lose data when it loses power & Flash Memory would keep at least something.

I have no idea who is correct, so I thought I would try a second opinion from you guys!!If my guy is correct should I get a second recovery firm to take a look or is there no hope?

Thanks again!I think your I/T person is closer to being correct! 

RAM is GENERALLY temporary memory. 

Flash memory will generally "hold" but I'm hedging -- I suspect, given a long enough time frame, that even flash memory will degrade.  I also imagine sometimes errors and things happen, too.Flash memory probably has a limit but it's yet to be experienced- most of the time flash memory dies from too many write cycles.

However they might have made a typo, and the device might NOT use flash memory, which seems a BIT silly if you ask me.Oh, man...if the PDA ran from RAM only, that would su -- not be good!