Smartphones

I keep waffling back and forth on getting a PDA/Phone device. My experience with the Nextel Blueberry was less than pleasurable -- it's a great device if your company uses Blackberry (which it does) and you like Nextel service (which I do), but the usability of the device itself is just plain horrible. The device was really only useful as a color Blackberry for e-mail and with an external headset as a phone. Holding the thing up to my head was very uncomfortable, and depending on how I maneuvered the earpiece, the volume was way too loud or impossible to hear.

The best PDA/phone combo on the market right now seems to be the Treo 600. Although it lacks compatibility with Blackberry, I look at the device and think that I really wouldn't need to carry my laptop with me on trips anymore, so I could use one of the many available desktop push solutions to make the Treo act like a Blackberry. Through my research, I've also been keeping my eye on the Motorola MPX device simply because it has a very cool design, a high resolution camera, and is a flip phone. Pricing for the Motorola PX has finally been released and can be found here on Smartfone.net. Suffice to say that I am not surprised that the MPX is expensive, but $1000?! It will certainly be interesting to see how the carriers subsidize the cost of the phone with multiple year contracts, but it's still a very expensive piece of hardware (and hopefully it's not based on the Nextel phone batteries or it's going to have horrible battery endurance).

In any event, I still go back and forth on what I want to do. If any of you have any opinions, I'd love to hear them.