It takes care of your calendar and task list, your email and instant messaging. It becomes your mobile library, with whatever selection of e-books you’ve downloaded. It plays your music and these days, possibly, some of your videos. With a Bluetooth keyboard and surprisingly powerful office applications, it allows you to take your work on the road. The latest generation includes models that also get you where you want to go, with a GPS navigation system.

Because you synchronise your portable files and programs with your desktop operating system, the choices you make are critical. Change the smart phone platform, and you’re going to be buying a lot of new software – fortunately relatively inexpensive software – and spending weeks, if not months, reading manuals and learning a vast array of new features.

We knew that shifting from the Palm-powered Treo to a Windows Mobile device was going to be agony, but the arrival of genuine 3G networks with broadband HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) capabilities had forced the decision on us. Palm’s operating system simply couldn’t handle simultaneous voice and data traffic on these high-speed networks - reflected in the fact that the latest Palm smart phone, the Treo 750, is a Windows Mobile device.

Then, just after we’d made our decision to move, Palm Inc. announced that before the end of the year, it would unveil a new Treo that runs the Palm OS on top of a Linux kernel, overcoming its key limitations, while retaining its advantages of virtually instant application operation and switching.

The question for Bleeding Edge suddenly became this: could we wait that long?

This sort of decision does require a lot of consideration. You’ve got to weigh things like network plans and coverage, and availability of handsets. One of the best resources is Whirlpool’s Phones forum, at whirlpool.net.au, where knowledgeable users discuss their experiences and the latest developments.

We’ve already prepared for the switch from the ageing Palm desktop to the Windows alternative, Microsoft Outlook. That gave us a taste of the likely obstacles in our path. The Palm HotSync utility couldn’t seem to handle the transfer of our contacts, calendar, tasks and notes to Outlook 2007, which we’d installed on our Windows XP system.
We messed around for quite a while, then finally decided to buy PocketCopy, from Chapura, for $US24.95.

It’s a one-time solution that transfers the data in your Palm Desktop to your desktop version of Outlook. After that, it’s a simple matter of synching Outlook with your portable device. It’s a simple, clever solution that we regarded as definitely worth the investment. All you have to do is choose the databases you want to transfer, and PocketCopy does the job without any fuss.

We’ve been looking at the Treo 750, the O2 xDA Atom Life and the Dopod D810 as potential replacements for the Treo 650. Each of them is impressive, but we’re leaning towards the Dopod, not just because of its full range of features, including WiFi, but also because of one small, but in our view highly useful feature: a small jog dial that greatly improves one-handed operation.

At around $1045, it even includes GPS capabilities – although the company has not yet released a ROM upgrade to activate that facility in Australia. According to Dopod, it’s going through the approval process with Optus and 3, and is expected to be released in May or June.

We’re happy to wait until then, because at the same time, Dopod is expected to release a new version of the D810 which would upgrade the processor from 400MHz to 500MHz, and possibly increase the RAM.
In the meantime, we’ve got to make some more decisions. We’ve been Telstra Mobile customers since it first introduced the digital network. If we were interested only in voice services, we almost certainly would have simply transferred across to its Next G network.

Telstra doesn’t offer the D810 on a plan – although you can buy one outright and use it on the Next G network - but we could have had the Treo 750 on a two-year, $70-per-month voice plan. As we mentioned recently, however, Telstra’s data charges for non-corporate customers are too high for us to contemplate.

That means we’ll have to switch to 3. It offers the Dopod D810 on its $29 cap plan with a $20 minimum monthly spend over 24 months. The 3 network has recently been updated to HSDPA , shifting data at typical speeds of 600kbps to 1.5Mbps. Telstra claims the NextG network has 100 times more coverage than its competitors, but 3’s coverage map, indicates that we’d rarely notice the difference.

More critically, 3 has also introduced its X-Series data plans, ranging from $20 per month for 500MB of data, to $40 per month for 2GB of traffic. You also get from 100 to 400 minutes of Skype to Skype VoIP phone calls.
It looks like we’ll be spending the next month or two familiarising ourselves with Windows Mobile, and making a final choice between phones – and networks. But we won’t be waiting for the release of those Linux- powered Palms. Even for laggards like us, it’s just too late.