Black Snake Phone

There are few people on earth who are happy when're working on a Saturday night, but I'm one of the few. Got another deadline coming up, but I needed a break, so I thought I'd gab a bit about my new cell phone.

My old trusty Treo 600 was showing its age and my 2 year Verizon contract was up, so I started looking at the idea of upgrading. When I found a great rebate deal through Sprint on a Treo 700p, I jumped at it. I didn't like leaving Verizon, since their support and call quality is top notch, but Sprint's cost on the Treo was $200 cheaper than Verizon's.

Plus, I read a lot of people raving about Sprint's unlimited high-speed data add-on. And WOW - the data plan is fun. I was IMDB-ing names from my seat at dinner. And while in San Francisco last weekend, I used the Google Maps application constantly.

Ian asked why I didn't hold out for the awesomely cool-looking iPhone. Three reasons-

-Too expensive. My Treo cost me a ton, but it still cost $400 less than the iPhone.

-Cingular exclusive. Except for people who travel to Europe and like to swap SIM cards, I've yet to meet anyone who loves Cingular. Consumer Reports didn't exactly have a lot of glowing things to say about them, either.

-Rev A. I'm trying to avoid Rev A Mac products. My G4 iBook had one of the recalled asploding batteries. Nuff said.

I'm hoping in a couple years, the iPhone will be in the cards for me. In the meantime, I'm loving my Treo. Plus my Treo 700p runs the Palm OS, so syncing everything to my Macintosh is a snap.

The only downside is that it won't play files bought from the iTunes music store, but I have an iPod for a reason. And if I do need music on my phone, it only takes a few minutes to burn them to CD-RW, rip them to MP3, and then play them on my Treo.

Okay - back to work. I'm hoping to go to bed in the next six hours or so...