Once upon a time, before cell phones did everything under the sun, I had a Palm TX. I also had a basic cell phone (you know, for actually TALKING to people) and I used my trusty Palm to keep a calendar, as a address/phone book and to jot down ideas whenever they happened to pop in my head.

Time went on, and I decided it was time to upgrade my cell phone. I had been using T-Mobile’s pay-as-you-go service for quite some time (best pre-paid plan, IMO) and as time passed on and I gained new friends, the number of minutes and text messages were getting to the point where getting a month-to-month plan was starting to make more sense.

Having been satisfied with my T-Mobile experience thus far, I decided to go to one of their stores and check out the shiny new phones (this was in late 2007). My hope was to get a phone that could do the PDA stuff that my Palm was currently doing, thus having everything in one handy device.

I went with a T-Mobile Dash running Windows Mobile 6.0. It appeared to have most of the stuff my TX did, and a full keyboard. I had to give up the touch screen, but for the most part it seemed like a good device.

Well, so much for that, Windows 6.0 sucks. I traded the simplicity of Palm’s PDA applications and functions for a hand-held version of Microsoft Outlook. That would be great if this was a work phone, but on a personal device it is annoying as all hell. The Calendar sucks and the Contacts list has too many damn fields.

There is also no program for typing in NOTES. I have to open Microsoft Word just to type in my farking grocery list. Some Brainiac at Microsoft also decided it would be a good idea to remove the ability to create new Office docs. “New Word Document?” Ain’t happening!

Instead, I keep a blank Word document on the phone, open it, and do a “Save As” whenever I wanted to create a new one. Farking brilliant.

Finally, Windows Mobile is just slow; I’m going to see which boots faster, my phone or my PC running Windows XP. Frankly, my money’s on the PC, and its so old it only has ONE core!

Not all is lost, though…