Slightly less unhappy

Or should that be more less not unsad?

Now that I've bitten the bullet and embraced the new phone, it's actually not too bad. It's not that pretty, at least in white: the black one Siobhan got is a lot slicker, as would have been the ice blue, but the white is bland and boring. It has very little memory and most of that is clogged up with stupid applications I can't remove; the phone makes a big deal of selling itself as a Walkman with built-in MP3 support (not like you can buy anything without MP3 support these days) yet it doesn't even have room to load two songs until you expand the memory. (Expansion is on order, though.) And of course going back to predictive type is painful after a QWERTY thumbboard and a big stylus touchscreen; but I don't do many texts anyway. (And on my new plan, they all cost extra. On the other hand, I can do photo messages now.)

However, as a phone it's pretty good. Fairly good sound quality, lightweight, good battery life. The Bluetooth is nice and supports A2DP for my headphones (which is essential to use it as an MP3 player, to me) plus it makes a very simple connection to my PC to transfer files to and from (or I can use a USB cable, but once I set up Bluetooth, it happens automatically, so why bother?).

The PC software is free, easy to use, and fully functional -- far better than with the Motorola Razr where they tried to sell you a $50 piece of software and prevent you from loading things onto the phone in hopes of getting you to buy ringtones online. The software also can sync contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes. Though the limited memory means I can't actually sync tasks, but that's not important: I already have my old phone (now I'll have to call it my PDA or my "brain" again) for that. Contacts was the important part. The contacts sync was quirky: it wasn't very smart about contacts with only a Company name and/or phone number, for instance. But I was able to edit the phone contacts on the PC to fix that.

But the one thing that has made a bigger difference in making me feel less irked about this is that there's a clip for the phone in the style I have for my old Razr, the style I like. I've got it on order, in fact. This kind of clip adds nearly no bulk (which is important; these days, phone cases are often bigger than the phone), and lets me grab the phone and use it easily without fiddling with the case at all, and put it back just as quickly. The problem with this kind of clip is it has to be made specifically for the phone in question: generic "small phone" clips are far more popular because one will serve dozens of phones.

I also made a few wallpapers from my PC wallpaper that are a jillion times nicer than the "edgy" ones they include:

For all that, though, I still wish I could go back to a single device. Maybe an HTC Fuze. Ahhhh....