Damn you Palm Pre

I ventured down to the Sprint store this evening confident in the fact that there was no way I could get sucked into buying a Palm Pre because they didn't have them in stock. Plus I was still very disappointed that Palm failed to implement a voice dial system. I have come to depend on it in the car since I drive a manual transmission. Everybody says just wait for a future update but I have come up on the short end of that proposition with Windows Mobile and Palm before. Then there were the nasty reports of hot batteries and discolored displays. I figure that, if anything, this would be a good chance to pick out the replacement for my Mogul.

So I get to the store and there it is. Good grief it is smaller than I thought...makes my Mogul look like a tank. Nice screen, responsive, intuitive OS. Calendar interface seemed passable, task list is lame (I am a PocketInformant power user) but the lack of categories really stinks. Its everything about how I organize things. And then I made a mistake...I opened the web browser. It thoroughly crushes any browsing experience I have EVER had on a Windows Mobile phone. I went over and used the Touch Pro, the Diamond and the Treo Pro. I used Opera, Skyfire and IE. Just forget it, it looked pathetic and slow on any of these Windows Mobile devices. The web browsing experience along with the UI was powerful enough to make me try to figure out how to live without categories, to actually read the user manual to see if speed dials are easy enough to live without until the fix that stupid oversight.

The news on the required plan changes was not as bad as I expected. Moving to a Family Everything Data Plan comes out to $20 more per month but for that I get data on all four lines (we only have data on two lines right now).

There are some other good phones at Sprint right now...if I had to put it in order it would be:

Palm Pre
Blackberry Curve
Palm Treo Pro/Touch Diamond
Touch Pro (I suppose the Touch Pro 2 might adjust this list)

Ugh...what to do. Well, I know the answer to that. Get the wife to Sprint so she can figure out what she likes (I am betting on the Curve...let's see how I do)

New Battery, New Life for the Sprint Mogul

So I took a chance on a cheap but supposedly OEM replacement battery from an eBay vendor for my Sprint Mogul. The old battery was so grim that even the power management system on the phone had pretty much given up on it. But the battery is indeed OEM and so far has cured the power problems. It was outstanding to get two days of battery life even with Exchange running and a dead zone at my desk that causes the phone to constantly search for a signal. Maybe the Mogul will indeed survive until contract renewal in June. For the record this marks the fourth phone in a row that had a battery failure within 6 months of renewal. Brilliant engineering.

Slow Death of My Sprint Mogul

My Sprint Mogul seems to be dying a slow death that no hard reset can fix. The power management has gone wonky. Hopefully the cheap but purportedly OEM battery I got off eBay will remedy it until my June renewal...I'm looking at you Palm Pre