I also think you don't need to keep referring to phones as PDA. You can just say that cell phones merged with what we used to call PDAs, or became more PDA-like. Somebody in a coma since 2000 would get that.
> At PDC on July 13, 2000, Microsoft announced that Whistler would be released during the second half of 2001, and also unveiled the first preview build, 2250. The build notably introduced an early version of Windows XP's visual styles system.
> Whistler was officially unveiled during a media event on February 5, 2001, under the name Windows XP, where XP stands for "eXPerience".
So while the product wasn't released until 2001, the codename and preview builds for developers were already released.
What did happen in May 2000 was that President Clinton turned off selective availability signal which made civilian gps signal much more accurate. See https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/
What I do remember, other than the obvious part that ubiquitous connectivity wasn't there yet, is that those products sucked compared to today. And that fits in with the 2000 action that allowed more accurate GPS to be used by the public.
Though even in 2007 or so I remember my phone gps sucking. It took a long time to get a fix and didn't have hinting from cell tower triangulation or sending nearby wifi APs to a server somewhere.