The Penalty Box

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about getting a non-laptop mobile computing device. I still haven’t gotten one, as once again I am plagued by indecision. My views on getting an all-in-one phone/PMP/PIM device haven’t changed a whole lot; I’d still rather keep the phone at least separate and I haven’t yet encountered a device that does all three in a fashion that doesn’t fail horribly at one of these functions. The iPhone’s phone sucks (not to mention random blowups yielding an unusable phone), Blackberry’s media player is terrible (and the Storm’s interface bloooooooows) and various entries from Samsung and LG have produced have been plagued with interface issues and twitchy firmware. Oh, and I’m still stuck on my contract for another year and a half. However, recent Samsung phones (like the Instinct and Omnia) have shown some promise and Nokia’s smartphones (like the N97) have less retarded operating systems (Symbian).
I actually was really leaning towards buying a Nokia N810 tablet, but of course reddit had to show me the next thing up and coming: the N900. My plan was to get a data plan for my phone and tether the tablet via Bluetooth (though I hadn’t actually walked into a Bell store and asked if this was possible yet). But the N900 looks a lot sexier, has a better profile than the N810 and Maemo > Symbian in comparison to the N97. Of course, it really is only worth it if you utilize the cellular feature of it (otherwise, it’s just an N810 with a slightly better profile and Maemo 5). Considering I’m locked in for another year and a half with Bell, that won’t work. But it’s so shinyyyyyy…

I suppose step 1 is to talk to a Bell monkey to see if tethering is actually allowable on a Bell phone without ludicrous data charges. If not, then there’s no point in getting a new tablet for now; I might as well continue trying to hack my old Palm into working with Linux. The one upside to all this indecisiveness is that it’s keeping money in my bank account.