The BBC video of the HTC "Touch" up here;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6722629.stm

makes it look pretty cool - that's a pretty sexy UI they've got on there - really good to see this stuff getting more "rich". I wonder how hard it was to build?

I'll admit that I gave up on Windows Mobile a little while ago for running my phone. I used to have one of these;

And I'd had it for ages and was finding that the battery life had got very bad and I just didn't enjoy using it as a phone. I swapped it for a regular person's phone;

Which worked really well for me as a phone but, to be honest, I did miss some of the SmartPhone functionality like having full access to my calendar and email automatically sync'd over the air to my Exchange Server. Also, the contact management software on those Razr V1's is really poor - I quite like the way the SmartPhone does its "search for a contact" feature or, maybe, I'd just got very used to it over time.

A couple of weeks ago I ditched the Razr and got my hands on one of these;

I was a little bit worried about ordering one of these because I'm not really a "PDA person".

That is, I'm not prepared to carry around a brick in my pocket just to get the benefit of being able to compose an email when I'm travelling. I also get really frustrated if a device needs to be constantly charged in order to keep it working and the PDA-like devices usually seem to exhibit that behaviour.

However, the Samsung has (so far) managed to surprise. It's definitely more "phone" than "PDA" (it runs the SmartPhone bits) and I'm really enjoying having it as a phone. It is a bit bigger than the average phone today but it's not actually that much bigger than the Razr when you put them side by side which was the first thing that I did.

What I like about it;

1. It's a read/write device. You wouldn't want to write a novel using that keyboard but you can use it for one line emails.
2. Screen's quite nice, clear and big.
3. It's pretty thin (thinner with the thin battery, see (6) below).
4. It has bluetooth, 3G and WiFi.
5. I get my mail, calendar and contact sync. Note on that in a second.
6. I got 2 batteries with it. A slim one and a fat one along with a separate charging cradle. This is great as it means that in my bag I can always have a spare, charged battery ready to go. This is possibly the best feature (ironic, eh?) of the device in that I'm never left with no charge.

Just a note on (5). One of the things I get with this phone in tandem with my mail server is the ability to have emails "pushed" from the server to the phone so that I get them as soon as they arrive. I noticed this because the phone would keep lighting up as I had it on my desk whenever it got a new mail and, initially, I was puzzled as to what it was doing.

Within an hour or two I was pondering how much extra power this was requiring and decided to switch it off and go back to sync'ing email on a schedule (i.e. every 20 minutes) rather than having it pushed out immediately - it's email so , by definition it can wait ;-)

I'll update this if I have negative experiences to add for the Samsung but, so far, it's really proving to be a very nice device. However, that HTC Touch looks like it'll be hard to beat :-)