I finally had to retire my I730 this week. It's painful. The screen calibration shifted on me for some reason and I can't enter my password. Weird! Asurian replaced it, although I had to press them to give me the accessories that I had for my i730 for the i760, like the high capacity battery, data cable, etc. I still haven't got the cradle yet. I may have to spring for that.

Verizon is selling the i760 for $149. With my new-in-2 it would have been $49, about the same as the $50 for Asurian, but with Asurian I can still get a new phone if I want.

I was hoping to limp by with my i730 till the end of 2009. HTC is supposed to come out with a new Touch then. The screen will be about the same size as the iPhone, but it will have a slide out qwerty keyboard. I saw the current European version which doesn't have the keyboard at the Microsoft Windows Mobile display at CES. It was really beautiful. Great display. I was told that they (HTC) was planing on putting a slide out keyboard on it and that it would probably be out by the end of this year. That would be really sweet. I think they said it would have a fairly high res camera (5-8 MP) and it will have the new OS, but I'm not positive about the last two points. (After 4 days of little sleep and information overload, some specifics blur.) It was the only phone that did anything for me. I know a lot of people love their iPhone, and Mike likes the hacked Sprint Touch Pro a lot, which I considered very seriously because of Mike's recommendation. But I just didn't love it enough to give up my i730, pay the $500-800 and have to spend the time hacking it, even though Mike has put in a lot of time and effort into a hack protocol that sounds very tight and would have probably saved days if not weeks worth of trial and error, and probably a few TO's (throwing objects).

O well , life goes on. I'll miss the speed, the plethora of programmable buttons, and the vertical slider of the i730, but I've heard that the i760's WM6.1 MR3 is a much improved OS, so hopefully life will be good.

Kevin