b.cognosco

I bounced my old Samsung N200 cell phone off the driveway tonight -- busted the fliptop so that I can't hear out of it anymore. The whole problem was that a couple of months ago the BodyGlove phone cover I bought when I purchased the phone 2-3 years ago broke and I had to throw it away. The phone is so old I couldn't find a new cover to fit it, so I wound up with a "universal" (meaning "doesn't fit anything") cover that was really just a holster.

I have to take the phone completely out of the holster to make or answer a call, which means handling the slick little plastic thing dozens of times a day -- a disaster waiting to happen. And tonight it did.

Add to that my old Handspring Visor Prism bit the dust a few weeks ago. The battery died. I got a new one from Laptops for Less for $50, but ever since I swapped batteries and reloaded the software it keeps corrupting the calendar database. And it has Fatal Errors every time an alarm goes off.

I could probably painstakingly fix the PDA by doing some sort of manual rebuild of the software one app at a time or something, but I don't want to do that. I don't have a day to spend futzing around with a "productivity" device just to get back to where I was. But I can't fix the cell phone. It's done. I have to get a new one.

I think I want a combo device, but for that kind of money I want WiFi capability. Bluetooth would be good, too. But definitely WiFi. The Treo 600 looks promising -- I like PalmOS -- but no Wifi. Supposedly SanDisk will have a WiFi SD/MMC card for PalmOS in Q2. But I've read that SanDisk has been promising such a card "any day now" since fall 2003 and keeps pushing the release date back.

Treo 600 supporters like Rick Klau and Jenny Levine seem very pleased. I'm just concerned that $600 is a lot of cash to drop on something that only connects to our questionable cell phone networks.

I'm open to suggestions. Drop me an e-mail if you have experience or recommendations for any of the cell phone/PDA combos.