Treo 650 smartphone

For the longest time, I've been carrying around my trusty Motorola StarTAC cell phone. It has served me well over the years, but it has started playing up lately, and going through batteries like noone's business. When the occasion demnaded it, I also carted around my Palm V PDA; this I won at a draw at a meeting of the BC Internet Association (or something similar) a few years ago. Both useful tools, but a pain to carry both around.

So I started looking at my options for a smartphone, and it came down to a choice between one of the Blackberrys or PalmOne's new Treo 650. After a bit more investigation, it seemed clear to me that the Treo 650 was the one to get. However, when I started looking at this stuff, back in January, the Treo 650 (much to my irritation) wasn't available up here in Canada ("April, hopefully" said the helpful guy at my local Rogers dealer).

I was planning to send Rogers a shitogram about this situation last week, but when I went to the web site to do so, they had a banner proclaiming the real soon now availability of the '650 in Canada. On Friday (the day before yesterday), I wandered up to my friendly dealer to enquire (not "inquire" as my North American friends would have; an inquiry and an enquiry are two distinctly different concepts) as to their availability. "Any minute now," says he. I took this to be salesman speak for "any day now", but he meant it. Not 10 minutes later did he call me, saying that his allotment of 5 Treo 650s had arrived. I asked him to put one aside for me, and that I'd be there in 5 minutes.

Good job too. When I arrived, I was the 2nd person to have claimed their phone, the third was behind me, and the other two were spoken for. My initial reactions are good: I like the phone, and the builtin PDA is a bonus! My StarTAC and Palm V have been officially retired. Now all I need to do is get a decent belt clip for it. Right now, I using a temporary crappy generic one (better than just sticking the phone in my pocket though). The belt clip I was isn't yet available in Canada. For some fscking stupid reason, PalmOne won't ship stuff from their US store to Canada, and the Canadian store doesn't stock the one I want! Argh! I'll give 'em hell tomorrow and see if I can't get one. Worst case scenario: I'll have one shipped to one of my US-resident friends, and have them mail it to me. Those PalmOne bastards won't deprive me of my chosen belt clip!

Well, that's all for today, dear reader. There's only a couple of hours to go before Smallville and Star Trek Enterprise are on, and I want to finish (re)reading The Hobbit this weekend. I'm busy tomorrow and Tuesday nights (blog entries to come if I get a few minutes), Wednesday night is free so far, and then on Thursday I'm back to Kelowna for Easter--yippee!