My old Motorola RAZR just wasn't cutting it anymore, so I decided to get myself a new phone last week. I'd been kinda looking around off and on for a while since I want something that has some of the "Smart Phone" capabilities, but isn't some huge monstrosity like the Blackberries or full blown PDAs. All I really want is a calendar, todo list, email, notes, and alarms... plus of course the basic calling and SMS features. Anything that includes a full QWERTY keyboard as buttons is going to be too big.

So I looked around a bit and found the Motorola A1200 (Ming) which seemed to fit pretty much all my criteria, with a microSD expansion slot to boot... though limited to 2GB I found out today. I highly doubt I'll ever need that much though. I suppose if I used it as my MP3 player as well I might come close, but I have an iPod for that. It also has the typical camera and video, which I seldom used before and don't expect to start now, but the voice recorder might come in handy for taking notes on the fly.

I was a little miffed that a Canadian company, SelectGSM.com, neglected to mention the fact that the phone had to ship from Hong Kong, and therefore I had to pay duty on it... but it was still cheaper than the competition overall and arrived in 3 days, so I mostly forgive them.

My only major issue now is syncing the contacts in it to my GMail account. There actually are a couple services out there to do this, but until Rogers/Bell/Telus stop screwing over consumers, I'm not tempted to pay the extravagant fees they require to be able to access the internet for over the air sync or email. The Motorola software that comes with it is nice enough, but really I have no urge to keep multiple places up to date. Seems like it'd be easy to find something to sync contacts either with GMail or Thunderbird from my desktop, but it's proving much harder than I anticipated. Maybe I can convince Rogers to throw some data transfer in since I'm using them for multiple products... or maybe the auction of the wireless spectrum will actually force prices to drop to something reasonable. Canadians pay the most for the crappiest coverage of any country in North American, Europe, and Asia. Hopefully that'll change before not too long here.