Well, the Verizon contract was up last month so I went cell phone shopping. The wife has a Palm Treo, as does my daughter, and both are extremely happy with them. I strongly considered the Treo, but couldn’t bring myself to go with it due to the lack of full support for handsfree bluetooth voice dialing. With California’s recent handsfree law, I wanted a solution that was 100% handsfree.

Enter the Blackberry. The Curve is a really nice device. No too big and not too small, great screen, great sound and 100% handsfree bluetooth dialing. The only downside I could find was having to give up the Palm Desktop and eWallet.

I really really dislike Outlook. The simplicity of Palm’s Desktop software along with Thunderbird as a mail client have been working well for me for many years now. Changing would be painful.

I also find eWallet an indispensable tool that I can’t do without. Good news there is that IliumSoft is working on a Blackberry version of eWallet that they promise to release real soon now.

After much introspection and second guessing myself, I finally went ahead with the Blackberry Curve. Spent a weekend of pain jumping through hoops to get the data off the Palm moved to Outlook so it would sync with the new Blackberry (that is a story in itself, not easy but doable).

Now that I’m there, I’m delighted. RIM did a great job on the Curve, the setup was a snap and the Desktop Manager seems to work well. Other than the pain of working with Outlook, I couldn’t be happier.

Now, if IliumSoft would just release eWallet….

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