Too Much Internet At My Fingertips

Hi! Me Again!

Hey, it's a busy life lately. Among other things this weekend, I biked up to a scenic overlook to take pictures; I participated in a disaster simulation where helpful volunteers wrongly pronounced me dead twice; and I upgraded my Sprint phone from a tiny l'il handset to a smart phone, specifically the Palm Centro.

The Centro, essentially, is the Sprint equivilent of the iPhone. And you may remember I was lusting after one of those things so badly that I bought an iPod touch, which is an iPhone only without the phone parts. I'd have had to cancel my service contract, and them iPhones are expensive enough as is. So now I have both, and I'm in a position to kind of compare the two of 'em.

First things first - if you have a Mac, get an iPhone. Syncing up your contacts and Calendar with the Centro is a painful multistep process that required 8 reboots, purchase of additional software, and great intuitive leaps that probably saved me days of even more heartache.

The iTouch is much much better for music and video. That sumptuous widescreen is irresistable. On the other hand, the Centro has years of software development behind it. There's a whole section in Fry's devoted to Palm software. The iTouch may catch up with 'em, but they just released the SDK for it this last week and I don't even think it goes out of beta before June.

The Centro has a tiny keyboard, but at least there are raised buttons for tactile feedback. The iPhone's keyboard is virtual, and it appears when it thinks you'll need it, devouring screen real estate.

Web browsing - iPhone. No contest, except... see below. Email? Same thing. However, I'll be using the Centro more because I can only get email on the iTouch if I'm near a wi-fi hotspot, and those things are harder to come by than you'd think. And that's an intersting point. Wi-Fi is the best way to get data right now, if you can find it. If not, you're at the mercy of your wireless carrier as far as data rates go, and Sprint is faster than the notoriously slow AT&T EDGE network, the only network which iPhone officially supports. So with iPhone, gorgeous pages that take forever to load, unless you're at Starbucks. But you're always at Starbucks, right?

At home, I have Wi-Fi, so if anything crashes and I need to check my email, I am covered.

For all these reasons, I'd going to keep 'em both.