*MUST* *RESIST* *SPENDING*

again, if you can afford it, and it's not gonna have nasty reprecussions on your finances, then what's the harm? i understand and appreciate the need for something everyone doesn't already have, i'm big on originality. i must admit, even with my love for gadgets, i don't think i could spend 900 bux on a fone, but then i have other priorities, lol...lord knows i'd pay a fortune for a mint in box g1 optimus prime if i had the dough to blow on it, so there's my vice. the way i read this, you're gonna regret it much more if you DON'T get that fone, and it'll eat at you. just do it! :)

My current phone is the Samsung SPH-i500, MSRP $600. I bought it for $300 over the Internet after various discounts were applied (no sales tax, either), about a year after it was announced (to be fair, I wasn't shopping for a phone when it first appeared; my AT&T-crippled Nokia 8260 worked well enough, though TDMA coverage around Lake Tahoe (and particularly along I-80 between Sacramento and Truckee) sucked).

The one thing I absolutely insisted on was to be able to sync the phone's address book to a computer, which the 8260 (and each of its predecessors) could not, to my great annoyance. I swore that I would never buy a phone that I had to put the data into manually, ever again.

While I want a phone to be nicely designed, I want function first, and I don't like spending a lot of money to get it. It sounds more like you want to trade out your current phone for this fashionable phone because it's pretty, and (for now) unique.

If it weren't GSM (yuck), I'd be tempted to go there too. It has bluetooth which suggests the sync problem is a non-issue. It seems to be small enough (I hate bulky phones after the 8260). Nokia is likely to get the SMS interface right (Samsung didn't). Nokia has a fixation on WAP as the answer to Internet browsing (it isn't; it sucks!), but the 8801 seems to have a real browser in it...

I still think that $900 is too much for a phone unless it comes with a service provider who'll blow you every week, and charge you nearly nothing for service ...

But if it will make you happy while not making you broke ...

You be better off sticking the $900 into an index mutual fund, though.

I hear all that you're saying, and agree almost completely... that what I don't doesn't matter much. I'm not JUST after novelty (though that is clearly a driving force here) but I'm actively trying to get away from Sprint, AND I miss Nokia phones, which prior to my sony-ericsson stint, loved. Minor things aside (such as the web browser), they've generally done pretty damn well in the UI design, and that works for me... and I still long for text input as good as what I remember on my Nokias.

That being said, you're right... and I have serious doubts I could get Cingular to hire someone I would find acceptable to blow me once a week. Though it's an intresting concept. ;)

What's taken the wings out of my sail is that I finally decided to do a size comparison with my current Sanyo, and the Nokia is larger. OUCH.

I want a SMALLER phone (I have a specific form factor in mind, appx the size of the T616). I don't care about most of the other features, such as a camera.

So, does it win me over on cool factor alone? Not as much as it did when I uninformedly believed it was a smaller phone. Reality is kicking in, and I'm backing down slowly.

However, if I do buy it online, I can get it for ~$400... is that better? ;)

WOW... did I ever managed to screw up the wording and grammar on THAT post. :P

Buying that phone is ridiculous.

Yeah. I think I've been somewhat beaten into accepting that fact. (this msg is the nail in the coffin :P)

I qualified for a cut-rate Treo 650 courtesy of United Airlines and I am debating taking the deal. It requires signing up with Cingular, I believe, and I don't know if I wantthat. The added cost may not justify the 'deal' and a new Palm may be a better, cheaper alternative.