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I Wanna New Phone

I put it in those terms because while my Treo 650 is beginning to show its age, it still (mostly) works. It does randomly stupid things, such as resetting while sitting on the table not being touched, and sometimes the call volume is ridiculously low (though that could just be my ancient and aging ears).

My needs are relatively simple. Anything I buy must do a desktop sync with Outlook. (Don't give me any grief, Outlook works just perfect for me.) I make this demand because I don't want to rekey all my contacts into a new phone, let alone my to-do's and calendar. If it syncs with Outlook then, voila, the phone just populates itself from my existing data.

After this comes my wish list. I'd like to be able to write and edit on any new device. This might be something as simple as entering a note and syncing it into the aforementioned Outlook, or something more complex like Documents-to-Go on the Treo (though Documents-to-Go frankly sucks and was the source of 99% of my Treo problems...until I just deleted the junk).

It would be nice if it played music, but I don't use that feature on my Treo. Thus, a lack of tunes would not cause me to pause. (Speaking of tunes, I'm listening to Steve Jablonsky's wonderful score to Transformers. Perfect music for the film and not half-bad to listen to all on its own.)

My shortlist of finalists includes the Helio Ocean, the T-Mobile Wing, and the forthcoming Sprint Touch. A dark horse candidate is a refurbished 4GB Apple iPhone. Why so specific? Because the theoretical price of such a device would be $250, and that's damn tempting. Of them all, though, the Touch causes me to drool the most.

For instance, the iPhone has some major drawbacks, primarily no solid support of 3rd party applications. Look at the fiasco with the latest 1.1.1 firmware update. It semi-bricked a slew of phones and killed any hacked apps. I don't question Apple's right to do this, since they gave fair warning that such hacks weren't supported, but it accentuates the developer-hostile attitude Apple currently has toward potential iPhone programmers. Things will change, but right now it's a huge red flag waving me away.

Meanwhile, the Ocean syncs with Outlook only on a very basic level and only from a distance. You go through some hoops involving exporting your Outlook contacts to either your Helio web account or another online service (such as Gmail) and then import them into the Ocean. It's a kludge but it works, and there's every potential that in the (near) future Helio will offer full desktop sync between the Ocean and Outlook. But that's speculation and/or wishful thinking.

Which brings me to phones running Microsoft Windows Mobile. Since I want to create and edit documents that narrows me further to the Professional version, which includes, among other things, mobile versions of Word and Excel. (This requirement also excludes the otherwise wonderful T-Mobile Dash.) If high-speed networking isn't an issue, then the Wing wins. Nice touch-screen, neat slide-out keyboard. Memory expandable via some variation of SD chip (micro? mini? whatever?). This is close to being a perfect little smartphone.

I'm less enthralled with some of its cousins, like either the AT&T 8525 or Tilt, or the Sprint Mogul, mostly because of the data plans those companies mandate. This is especially so for AT&T. The cost for each easily exceeds $80 a month for unlimited texting and unlimited data. In contrast, T-Mobile runs around $60 a month, including unlimited text/data. Of course for the extra money both AT&T and Sprint offer much faster data networks, or at least in theory as far as AT&T is concerned. AT&T doesn't offer high-speed networks in my area, so they're pricing is outrageous.

So you might think the Mogul is perfect, but it's heavier than the Wing and costs wads more.

Which returns me to the Wing and the Touch. The Wing would be cheaper to feed each month, i.e., a lower monthly bill, but the Touch is...well, the Touch is just damn gorgeous. To my very biased eye it makes the iPhone look like a hack. It's small, it's elegant, offers full sync with Outlook, gives me access to Mobile Word and Excel (and more), has a useful and (again) elegant home screen, and offers as that brilliant little final touch (ha!), the Touch-Flo interface.

The largest complaints about the original HTC Touch center on the included RAM, the processor speed, and its touchscreen keyboard. The Sprint version offers double the RAM, double the processor, and three keyboard layouts. And if none of those is satisfactory, there are at least two other options available for download and install, either of which looks really, really sweet.

Which, btw, gives a final reason to ignore the iPhone for now. The touchscreen keyboard in the iPhone is very nicely done, in contrast to the standard Windows Mobile software keyboard, yet while Apple actively loathes and shuns 3rd party developers, Microsoft embraces them. Thus HTC was free to develop its Touch-Flo interface on top of Windows Mobile, while other developers were free to develop better software keyboards.

In short, I think I'm willing to pay the higher monthly fee for the Sprint Touch because Sprint offers its high-speed data network in my area, and the Touch meets all my needs. As a bonus, it is just plain geeky cool, hated only by those who are utterly and insanely committed to the Apple iPhone.

The only question is what the initial purchase price will be like, and that should be revealed shortly as the rumored release date for the Sprint Touch is November 4, 2007. If it's too high, well, there's always the Wing to fall back on, and it, too, can use those same software keyboard add-ons. Thus I'm in a win-win situation.

I hope my Treo won't get too depressed.

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