As of yesterday evening, Sarah and I are no longer Nextel subscribers, and have moved over to Sprint, and in the process, acquired "smart" phones.

I've acquired a Sprint/HTC/UTSmartCom/Audiovox PPC6700, running Windows Mobile 5. Granted, it's not an iPhone (which, by the way, I got to play with today, and it's freaking cool, and freaking slick, and freaking fast), but I think this will suit my needs. It's also significantly cheaper than the iPhone, especially considering I'd be breaching my contract with Nextel to move over to AT&T at this point. And the fact that you can't get an iPhone right now because they're sold out everywhere.

Anyway, my initial thoughts aren't too bad. The Windows Mobile interface is kind of slow, but definitely usable. The phone is a lot bigger than what I'm used to, but it's still smaller than many comparable smartphones on the market. Having access to my mail is a nice feature. Pocket Internet Explorer is almost completely useless, but I suppose it's better than the "browser" that was on my Nextel phones. I downloaded a copy of minimo, which is a Mozilla project. It works, and does some things better than IE, but it's significantly slower and not terribly stable, so I can't really make a determination of which is "better".

Unfortunately, signal strength at my house isn't great on Sprint's network either. I get somewhere between zero and two bars depending on where I am. This is similar to how Nextel was when we moved in last year, but a few months later, they must have put up a new tower or something because the signal went up to full nearly overnight. Hopefully Sprint will do the same. Granted, I'm not depending on the cell at home, as we have telephone service over the cable network from Time Warner.

One nice thing I found out is that the Windows Mobile software does not correctly indicate to the network when a data call is coming from the phone itself or from a Bluetooth device, which means that I can use my phone as a high-speed bluetooth modem with the cheap data plan that I have, rather than needing to buy the exorbitantly overpriced plan that Sprint wants people to use if they want Bluetooth modem functionality.

Anyway, I'll give the thing a few days and we'll see how it goes.

Update: Opera mobile kicks Pocket Internet Explorer's ass.  Suitable web browser found.  Also, I discovered that my phone has a very realistic sounding sampling of a mechanical phone ringer available as a ringtone.  It urges to be paired with this.