Text The Mob lets you do cool things like set up polls and message boards for instant feedback, so if you're doing something like giving a conference presentation, people can text their questions to the board or vote on something. Or imagine you're having a talent show people and letting the audience vote on the best performer on stage. Nice.

Mobile phone service Stitcher provides a selected list of news feeds that are read to you. The production quality of this service is very good, and works well for iPhone users. Sign up, and Stitcher sends you a link to their IUI interface in Safari for the iPhone. When you find the feed you want to read, you click on a link to play the Quicktime file in your browser, and someone starts reading you a summary of the news from sites including TechCrunch and Wall Street Journal.

My six year old son did the light motion. I snapped with the iPhone.

I've found myself back in the market for a small smart phone again after my iMate Jam died from the numerous falls it took. (Note to cyclists, don't carry an expensive phone in a jersey pocket with food in it.) I sent back the Blackberry Pearl 8100 I was trying out a few weeks ago and am now on the hunt for its replacement.

My Phone and service requirements
I just want a phone that has email, web, calendaring and contact management and plays nicely -- syncs reliably -- with Mac OS X. Being able to read MS Office and PDF docs is a plus, I suppose, but not essential. Tethering either my MacBook or Lenovo Thinkpad are also possible uses I might consider useful, so cost for that service has to be considered.

Carrier service plans
I've compiled a cost comparison of service providers in the NYC area. This comparison looks for service packages that include the least expensive voice options and unlimited data from cell phone carriers serving the NYC area.

Note that there is a difference between Edge and EVDO service. Edge is capable of providing up to 200K upload at peak (more likely to get ~100K) while EVDO is capable of providing at peak up to 2.4mb upload (more likely to get ~600K). More information about Edge vs. EVDO at cnet. Also helpful was seeing this real world speed tests comparing Sprint and Verizon. I'm leaning towards Sprint after reading in bulletin boards that they appear to provide the fastest EVDO data service at the lowest cost.

Also worth noting is that choosing a Blackberry option would incur different costs. For example, TMobile has a Blackberry plan with unlimited data and 1000 minutes voice for $70.

Picking a phone
I have no idea what phone to use. Right now it's between the Treo 700p or 700w and the Blackberry 8700. The 8700 may be a viable option now since Daniel Pasco has come up with a solution for tethering a Mac to it, thanks to Alex for raising the bounty. Only downside to the Blackberry route is having to pay $4/month for proxy service unless you run your own, and I don't intend to do that.

I think I'm actually leaning towards the Treo 700p. Treonauts has a nice table comparing the current Treo phones. I know it's a downgrade (or maybe a sidegrade) from feature set of a Pocket PC, but I want absolute synching reliability and am willing to trade off some functionality for the peace of mind that comes with a Palm device talking to a Mac. I've had an iMate Jam Pocket PC phone synching with Mark/Space's Missing Sync and it's worked pretty well, but flaked out occassionally, requiring re-installs. My wife is now using one of the HTC Wizards (the 8125 on Cingular) and it seemed to be synching nicely, but MissingSync stopped connecting all the way all of a sudden this morning for her. Typical. I just don't want to waste time constantly tweaking my phone to get the address book and calendar synched up. I want something that just works and I can't wait around for the Apple smart phone that people have been predicting with confidence for over a year now. Of course, now that I'm ready to buy a new phone, I'm sure Apple will release the damned thing. Anyway, Pocket PC is out for me.

The only other real contender for me is really the Blackberry. I liked the push email, but am not sure I need or want to be that connected and available. After trying the Pearl 8100 for a week, I was also pretty unimpressed with the user experience. That Java UI that Blackberry users tout as simple and genius is a hierarchical mess to me. I'm a former Sidekick I, SK II, and PPC user so I have different expectations for ease of use. The SK UI is simply the best on any smart phone I've used. The PPC was fine because it was familiar, albeit in that Microsoft kind of way. And I wasn't very happy with SureType on the Pearl 8100. It worked remarkably well until you got to forms, especially password entry. There's no predictive typing for passwords, so you're left to do multi-tap entries there. Yuck. The real show stopper is that there's presently no Mac synching support with the Pearl yet. I'm tempted to hold out for the 8800, which will provide a full QWERTY keyboard and better Bluetooth support so we Mac users can tether using something like the Fibble.org script. But it'll still be a Blackberry experience and I've never synched a Blackberry with the Mac so I don't know how that goes, i.e. if it's reliable using Pocket Mac's software.

So I'm back to weighing the cost of experience vs. features and functionality, and what do I find myself looking at? On the surface, to a Mac user the Palm Treo 700p looks the logical choice -- the one running the Palm OS and not the Windows Mobile OS. But it's a step backward. If simplicity and reliability are the most important factors with all service speed and cost issues being equal, I personally think the Palm OS wins for now. That comes after trying quite a few smart phone OSes. But I also have to remind myself why I left the Palm platform in the first place -- I was an early adopter of the Treo, having owned the gray flip top 180g. The OS at the time was the reason I left. I couldn't have email, web, and IM apps running simultaneously. I don't think that's an issue anymore. One downside is that the 700p won't be upgradeable to the faster EVDO Rev A. For that reason alone the 700w might be more attractive or any of those HTC Wizard devices that every carrier seems to sell.

So anyway, I'm letting all of this information soak in for a while before I consider making the leap again. It's been a while since I've had to pony up extra dough for a smart phone, and for the extra service charges. Luckily my TMobile contract period is over so I can go the rebate route using Wirefly.

Any suggestions on the right phone to select for a Mac user would be greatly appreciated.

One of the problems being an early adopter is not having accessories like device cases for your gear. I started using a Blackberry Pearl 8100 last week and was using a case I sewed out of painting canvas for a few days to keep things in my pocket from scratching the screen. Today I sewed together an interim case using an old laptop screen protector/keyboard cover from Other World Computing. I used a quarter to trace a thumb-slide hole.

Right side out

Inside out

The right side out version looks nice and the fit is snug, like a condom for my cell phone. But because I put the shiny leather side out and the velvety side in, the phone doesn't slide out as nicely as when it's inside out. I also like the way the case feels inside out, so I may try it that way for a while. Of course, when a better, more appropriate case comes out, I'll probably just use that and dump this one, but you gotta make do with what you have or can make. This serves its purpose for now.

I guess I'll also post more thoughts on using the Pearl a little later. Still testing it out to see if the SureType works for me or if I should send it back and wait for the 8800 with the full keyboard. I'm a Sidekick refugee, having owned the I and II, so I've got lots of nits about the user experience, but the form factor and speed are working for me so far.

Always with me. 12 May '05, 1.59pm PST.

I'm through with the Sidekick. It was a very reliable phone for email and instant messaging (with the exception of that 3 day outage). But the PIM just wasn't doing it for me and after my son started using it as a full time gaming device and accidentally tore off one its the rubber keys, I just gave it to him. T-Mobile told me they wouldn't be able to replace it for less than like $120. I've owned all three generations of Sidekicks. The last two had something become irreparably damaged within the first year. They've been very usable devices otherwise, but with the SKII, I noticed that web surfing became incredibly slow for some reason. Perhaps it had something to do with the proxy servers?

So now I'm sporting the i-mate JAM, seen above in my palm playing a compressed DVD. Below the phone is the Canon SD 20 digicam. Small, sweet devices that pack a lot of punch.

The Jam is incredible. I ebayed my iPaq a few months ago because I didn't like having to carry it around along with my phone. I thought maybe I'd wait around for those Motorola phones with iTunes or the 3 megapixel digicam built in, but I figured what I needed most wast the PIM features of a Pocket PC or Palm device. After a month of research, I was not impressed with the Treo and didn't like the huge candybar Pocket PCs.

The JAM is tiny for PPC phone. It's roughly the size of a 4th generation iPod. With the JAM, I can do everything I used to do on the iPaq -- watch compressed DVDs, listen to MP3s, email, calendaring, web browsing, etc. All that stuff. When I get a 1GB SD card I may even start carrying my iPod around less. Oh and it's got a crappy 1 megapixel camera too, but I can't deal with the low quality images these camera phones take, so I have to carry the SD 20 with me -- the perfect everywhere phone.

Email is working like a champ, checking both my gmail and regular POP accounts. Internet Explorer is also working well, although there were service problems on T-Mobile these past 2 days. I also got the Computer Devices SDIO WiFi card, which worked great around the house. So far so good.

Synching with my Mac has not been so smooth yet. PocketMac is sort of working right now, but the software hasn't been fully upgraded for Tiger. It's successful at synching my Address Book contacts, but iCal isn't synching yet. iSync isn't seeing the PPC yet either. Hopefully when the Tiger upgrade happens, this will be resolved. I can live with that for now.

Update: Pocket Mac Pro 3 and other PM apps were updated for Tiger. The download is free for licensed users and works like a charm with the JAM.

If you've got the dough to shell out for one of these puppies, I can highly recommend purchasing it through David Weineger, whom I found by sifting through JAM reviews on mobile phone forums. Don't be daunted by the site. He next day Fedexed it to me and was really great to deal with.