Getting a new phone

By time this posts, I'll already have ordered and perhaps received my new phone. My current one is an HTC Fuze which I bought used, and it's suffering from old age syndrome; the keyboard is failing on me, there's a crack on the screen which so far hasn't caused problems, and I am having more trouble with battery life.

Two years ago, AT&T bought out Unicel, and soon after I was forced to transfer my contract over to them. This, I later learned, counted as a "re-up" (perhaps just because they also forced me to change phones) which meant I was not allowed, that summer, to buy a new phone at a reasonable price. Except for iPhones which you can always upgrade to, but until they make one with a hard keyboard, I don't want one. So I bought a used phone and moved my SIM into it, and got a data plan.

October 19th is when I am finally eligible to "re-up" and get a better phone at a good price (by virtue of extending my contract), and I'll be placing my order first thing. My next phone will be the successor to this one, the HTC Tilt2. It's very similar, but runs a slightly later version of Windows Mobile, has a slightly improved keyboard, tons more preinstalled software, and a few other minor improvements. I'm hoping it'll be about the same as my current phone but with some of the rough edges smoothed away, and the greater ease of use that comes from having the software pre-loaded for AT&T and preconfigured to my account.

I intend to get the extended life battery for it right away. The new belt clip I'll be getting is face-in, not face-out like my current one, so the extra thickness from the battery won't impede its use.

Now I need to figure out how to move over the essential software I use all the time on my phone, and the data, and the configuration. You'd think they'd've made that easier by now, but even iPhoneOS doesn't really handle that as well as you'd like.

Oh, yeah, and I should probably make sure it'll work as a phone, too, just in case I ever need that.