Comment How about just a Palm phone? (Score 3, Informative) 101
Do you specifically want a 'smartphone', or do you have a must-have feature list that's long? If not, why not get one of the simpler palm/phone combos?
I got the Samsung i500 shortly after it came out, and I love it. Form factor is great, battery life is good, color Palm 4.1 functionality works great, and the voice quality is as good as the network you're on (since basically the 'phone' software is just a Palm app that's hardcoded in - the mode switch button on the side is incredibly useful).
Signal strength is a little weak due to small antenna, and it does not have many of the funkier features bigger phones have like external speaker, enough space for MP3's, etc. Only thing I miss is not having an expandability slot of some kind: the original i500 is stuck with 16MB. Integration between Palm apps and the phone is good, but not great: most places in Address you can press Talk to dial the currently selected phone number, but you can't if you're actually editing an address record.
Other than very occasional sync problems, I've had no stability issues: the phone has never failed or had problems due to Palm apps or anything. So if stability is a concern, look for one of the less-feature-overladen Palm phones. 8-)
P.S. SprintPCS is great. But SprintPCS also sucks: no *supported* SMS exists for this phone that I know of.
I got the Samsung i500 shortly after it came out, and I love it. Form factor is great, battery life is good, color Palm 4.1 functionality works great, and the voice quality is as good as the network you're on (since basically the 'phone' software is just a Palm app that's hardcoded in - the mode switch button on the side is incredibly useful).
Signal strength is a little weak due to small antenna, and it does not have many of the funkier features bigger phones have like external speaker, enough space for MP3's, etc. Only thing I miss is not having an expandability slot of some kind: the original i500 is stuck with 16MB. Integration between Palm apps and the phone is good, but not great: most places in Address you can press Talk to dial the currently selected phone number, but you can't if you're actually editing an address record.
Other than very occasional sync problems, I've had no stability issues: the phone has never failed or had problems due to Palm apps or anything. So if stability is a concern, look for one of the less-feature-overladen Palm phones. 8-)
P.S. SprintPCS is great. But SprintPCS also sucks: no *supported* SMS exists for this phone that I know of.
