I finally upgraded my phone and moved up to a Sony Ericsson T610 from T-Mobile. I have really liked my service from Sprint PCS but it was time to change phones and bluetooth was a checklist item for me and Sprint has been dawdling too long on just about all technology fronts. Time to move on. So yesterday after the new phone came active, I put away the Sprint PCS Wireless Web Digital Link for the last time. It got dropped from support so fast I can’t even find any official links for the thing anymore, which is really disappointing. It didn’t sell really well, so the planned 3G upgrade never happened and for awhile they were actually giving them away for free if you really wanted one. It was good to me and I really enjoyed it but going back to a seperate phone is actually a nice change, and since the T610 has bluetooth when I replace my venerable Handspring Visor Platinum with either a Palm Tungsten T3 or Tapwave Zodiac 2 (still undecided) I’ll still have the features I used to use but with a lot more flexibility.

The things that I like about the Zodiac are that it has dual SD slots (1 SDIO compatible) and built-in vibrate function for alarms (though designed for the games it’s supposed to run). The downsides are that it is bigger (not that I’m not used to a huge PDA) and doesn’t have the usual hardware buttons which means that some apps just don’t work. Besides, I don’t think it’s going to be all that successful and the point of this round of purchasing is moving to the outer edge of the land of early-adopters for awhile.

I had been really excited about getting a Garmin iQue 3600 this last summer but there are several troubling problems with that unit. First, the built-in GPS reciever is not NMEA compatible so I would be locked into Garmin’s built-in software and any app that supported the iQue hardware (Did that with the Digital Link already, thanks). Second, my next PDA has to be able to support Bluetooth, preferably built-in and the SD slot on the iQue does not support SDIO. So, no iQue for me.

However it looks like I should be able to do the same functions but with only an extra device using the DeLorme Bluetooth Wireless Earthmate GPS PowerPack! And I’ll be able to use it with the laptop as well so it will be just better all around! And if I don’t want to go Bluetooth (which I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t) there are SD and cabled solutions as well. I’m really looking forward to using Vindigo on a new Tungsten T3 with the map functions kicking in and showing me where a nice little place to eat is and then sending the number to my phone to dial and ask about reservations.

Ah, the wireless future!