Originally Posted by tsatryan

Why, thank you for missing me, Mr. Thrizzle! It's nice to be missed! I have been in and out, lurking some, reading, and running all over. I was on vacation, and have been doing quite a bit of travel in my ministry, as we are once again planting another new church.

That being said, I have to say something else here, totally unrelated to my absence. Although I have been using pocket pc's since before convergence, and have had three phone edition pocket pc's, and have now been, with all of you, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the i760... I am contemplating very strongly jumping to another phone... and - don't tar and feather me - but, I have looked strongly at, and visited the at&t store as well as the Apple store - and played with their iPhone, and talked and talked and explored, etc etc. I am about 90% convinced to picking up the iPhone.

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but as I see others saying similar things here, let me share my mind's logic and thoughts...

1. I have been using the i730 for close to two years now, and although I have been generally happy with it, there are things that have always been an issue. And we all know what they are. You can't own the i730 without becoming intimately familiar with the soft-reset. As well as doing hard resets. With all the best of tweakings we can do - and I have followed Michael's set up guide, and all his tools to the "t" - I have still had to do a number of hard resets from time to time, and soft resets even more frequently. I am sure that most of these are made necessary due to the software I have installed, especially the things that we need to use to make the phone do what it should have had from the beginning, meaning memory management and phone notification, etc. These are things the phone should be able to do natively, but it doesn't. And adding software to do it means increased instability. I'm surely not an expert with the i730, but I am certainly above average. Our resident expert, MRailing, himself does a hard reset on a routine basis just to keep his phone working smoothly. We all have just lived with that. And, I'm sorry, it really shouldn't have to be that way. I would love to recommend my phone to my friends and associates, but I can't do that in good conscience, because I know what the maintenance requirements are with it.

2. I had to do a hard reset - again - about three weeks or so ago. I have only re-installed the minimum items I need to work with. Even with that said, I have been getting regular lock-ups, often when I have been cradled for a while. I will leave my office, grab the i730, and not realize until hours later when I have not received any calls that the phone is actually quite dead and frozen. Poke it in the eye again to wake it up, and then wonder what calls I missed. I can't afford that. If one of my parishioners is calling me, they need to get me. I travel a lot. And my phone is my connection that allows me to do that while still being totally assessable to my people.

3. I am sure it's due to the life of the phone, but my battery life is now abysmal. Some days, depending on use, I only get a half a day out of the battery before I need to charge. So, as a result, instead of my phone serving me, I end up serving it. That's just not right.

4. So, I have been waiting for the i760. Much of what I hear and understand is that it really only has a few advantages over what the i730 is - a different form factor, and WM6. The form factor appears to be a bit smaller - I compare it with the Blackjack, and that is a great size. But I think the i760 will be significantly thicker that that. And, other than HTML email, I don't know that there is really anything that WM6 is going to offer that WM5 doesn't already have. And - most importantly - I REALLY don't want to commit to a new phone if it means that I will continue to have problems with resetting, and adding on software and tweaking things to do what the phone should just do out of the box.

5. I have looked at and played with the iphone. It is a thing of beauty - the form factor is tremendous. No one argues with that. It's drawbacks, though, are it being on at&t, the many things that it can't do that the Windows Mobile platform can do, and current lack of any 3rd party software. But, here is the thing that is grabbing me. Around here, at least, it seems that at&t's network is about equal to vzw. When I think of what the iPhone CAN do, there really isn't a lot that I need it to do that WM can do. And, what the iPhone can do, it does superbly. And, as far as third party software, much of the stuff we all put on our WM phones isn't needed on the iPhone, because it comes with it, or is unnecessary.

6. I'm not crazy about the price of the iPhone, compared to what we anticipate the cost of the i760, but truth is, when considering the monthly price of at&t compared to vzw, in about 6 months the cost difference is made up, and then its less expensive after that.

I could say more, because this is surely not something that I am considering on a whim. But, I don't want to further hijack this thread.

My decision is not totally made up yet, so, please - tell me why I shouldn't do this. PM me, or start a different thread to do so.

I am not considering this solely because of the delay by VZW, but it is indirectly because of it. The longer I have waited, the more that I have had time to fully consider what the best option may be. And where I am at right now, I guess I am more looking for reasons that I should wait longer for something only marginally different than what I currently have, as opposed to getting something now that will end my servitude to my aging i730.

Help me out here, folks!