So I finally got a new phone. I’ve been using the very solid, very useful, very plain Samsung T509 for a very long time, and I have absolutely nothing but praise for it. It is compact, lightweight, solid, and incredibly durable (I twice dropped it in water and, once dried, it continued to work beautifully). Recently, however, its usefulness began to fade as the battery (brand new, mind you) would drain within a few hours of being fully charged and I would randomly have operating system crashes in the form of a white screen. It became an annoyance. So I hopped over to T-Mobile and looked for a good upgrade that wouldn’t cost me an arm and a leg.

I ended up going with the T-Mobile Shadow, which is an exceptional leap forward in terms of usability, applications and, dare I say it, connectivity. It’s lightweight, compact, and has a very satisfying slider that I just love using. It’s got space for an SD card, stereo bluetooth compatibility, runs Windows Mobile operating system, and is, just generally, much more phone than I am used to.

Was a time when I considered the end-all, be-all of phone functionality to be limited to phone calls and text messaging. But it’s actually kind of hard to get a phone that does those two functions well and doesn’t overload your brain with extra functionality. I have shunned so-called “Smart Phones” for so long that I hadn’t realized how simple and advanced they have become. That my phone has a WiFi card is just stunning to me. Perhaps I’m more a Luddite than I initially thought.

In any event, thus far it’s been a seamless transition. I stored all my contacts on the T-Mobile address book which is available online, rather than stored on the SIM card, so once the phone connected, I had all my contacts synchronized and ready for use.

Speaking of synchronization, the damn thing has a USB cable to connect to my computer for synchronization with images, music, scheduling, contacts, emails–the thing is more computer than many of my previous computers (consider the Tandy 1000, my first real desktop).

There are downsides, of course. The voice quality on the handset isn’t the best, and given my hearing issues caused by years and years of listening to very loud music far too often, it’s troublesome. Fortunately, the stereo earphones work very nicely for this and, according to people I’ve talked to thus far, the quality of my voice transmitted through the headset’s microphone is completely understandable. It’s even got a 2.0 Megapixel camera attached to it. My first digital camera… let’s not even get into that.

I imagine that I’ll find things about it that frustrate me, but for now I think I’ve made a very good choice.