And Now for Something Completely Different...and Geeky

I have to say that I was excited about the iPhone when it came out, although not excited enough to actually go and buy one. Even when the second version came out, no biting from this hard-core functionality girl-geek. I need my technology to not only be pretty, but be extremely functional. That said, I am also a dyed-in-the-wool (i don't know what that phrase really means but it somehow feels right to use it here) Mac-head, as the first real home computer I ever used was my uncle's old Macintosh with the black and beige-ish floppy disk drive that I used to play video games on when I was a kid. The biggest single purchase I've ever made was of the beautiful (yes, I said beautiful) and highly functional 15" aluminum Powerbook G4 that I'm typing on right now. And yes, my beautiful laptop has a name, but I'm not telling you what it is.

So my Mac credentials are firmly established. At the same time, I have been using a Palm handheld organizer device of some kind for the past four years or so. I find them extremely handy and useful, and practical, not to mention cheap. So despite my lust for the iPhones--which was tempered and cooled by the fact that AT&T's service plan for it cost a good $99 per month--I stuck with my handy-but-not-at-all-fancy Zire, with my handy-bu-even-less-fancy Samsung Sprint cell phone as my mobile communication tool.

But now, all bets are off. Because Palm has out-Mac'd Mac with the new Pre, a mobile device that seems to do everything I liked about the iPhone and then some. The iPhone is pretty and has some cool, interesting apps which are completely useless as time management or practical tools (yeah it's cool that you can find the name of a song just by putting your iPhone up to the stereo as it's played, but really, I'd rather have system-wide cut-and-paste functionality!), but the Pre is just a better work horse. Of course, this is a new gadget and there will most likely be many bugs to be worked out, but I have to say, I'm geekin' out over here.