This got me to thinking: I need to get her something to replace the N710C, but what? I don't care much for the "slider" design of the Tungsten T3. It just doesn't say "durable" to me. The 90-day warranty on the Tungsten E makes that one another no-go. Doesn't palmOne believe in its products any more, or do they just not care?

"Doesn't palmOne believe in its products any more, or do they just not care?"

The Wi-Fi implementation on the Tungsten C is pretty lame--I'd rather buy an Asus MyPal A730W. There are a lot more interesting things I could do with that, and most of those are stories for another day. The Tungsten T5 doesn't seem like a great deal for the money given the prices that jump drives are going for nowadays. Come on guys, flash memory is pretty cheap these days. And what about Palm OS 6? The Zire 72 is OK, but about the only thing that model has going for it is a $50 rebate, and it doesn't come with any of the business software that she would need, like Documents to Go.

PalmOne needs some competition, and I don't mean Microsoft. Maybe the Treo killed off the Visor when Handspring was still a separate company. It seems to me the Treo is now killing off whatever innovation is left in Palm hardware design land. Sony has departed these shores and retreated back to its native land, where the CLIE has recently been given the sack. So, it looks like we're on to the smartphone wars: Symbian vs. Palm OS vs. Microsoft, and whatever the Japanese decide they might care to send our way.

As a Japanophile, I have seen what phones can do. Japanese mobile phones make American cell phones look like Fisher-Price toys in terms of size and capability. However, their networks are a lot more advanced than ours, and they don't have as many competitive disadvantages to overcome. There are only three major carriers in Japan, and they have far less ground to cover than American carriers.

I'm a T-Mobile customer, so I carry a GSM telephone. GSM phones have SIM (Subscriber Information Module) cards inside. Without a SIM card, a GSM phone is just a paperweight. It has no information about the carrier, your plan, or any of the other things it needs to join the network. The nice thing is, if you can get your phone unlocked, you can go to many other countries (except Japan, where GSM isn't used), buy prepaid SIM cards from local carriers and make relatively cheap local calls instead of running up huge bills roaming on your own carrier.