To be honest, I tried waiting. I really wanted Danger to come thru for me.

The SK evolution has been really great. However, I am a technophile and there were several technological and business model advancements that just weren’t coming to fruition.

1) No bluetooth. This is a wireless unit to unit mechanism that is built into pretty much every Mac now. People think that bluetooth isn’t much right now, but they said the same thing about USB. With Bluetooth you have unwired headsets. This is huge for starters because you don’t have to worry about tangling between your ear and the phone. This also is being built into more car audio systems to allow you to use a phone that automatically kills the radio audio and will use the car’s speaker system for your call. VERY helpful.

2) No Mac sync. And I feel badly because this is more a shot taken at the business relation between T-Mobile and Danger. The technology is available and in there, but the two companies are more interested in monetizing EVERYTHING then making things convenient for the users who will pay a pretty penny for the service. This software was written, tested, and ready to ship from a 3rd party. Because of the business relationship… this didn’t come to fruition. Which leads to…

3) Proprietary software that requires T-Mobile’s blessing. Even if you have the time to learn the java based framework from Danger (which is quite robust) then you have to pray that T-Mobile and Danger will bless the app to release it into the wild. You can run it on your own but only at the risk of voiding support contracts.

4) The John Byrne syndrome. This is an analogy. When comic star “John Byrne” took over the “Superman” comic he wanted to show Superman’s Human side. He felt he needed to “throttle” the character down a bit. The result was described as putting a roaring river behind a dam and attaching a spigot with a very slow output. So much potential held back. T-Mobile has taken danger’s technology and throttled it. First in having decision on which apps it releases, and more importantly disabling certain built in technology from the end user. Two which come to mind is the ability to email yourself an mp3/wav file and install it as a ring tone. Secondarily, there is a full unicode character set built in. With the latest update, that is removed from the consumer’s ability to use it.

So, I’ve gone and finally switched to the Treo 650. Here’s a look. I have now replaced all the apps that’d I’d been using. The downsides so far are

1) a smaller keyboard. (I’m not typing anywhere nearly as quickly as I did on the SK2.
2) The IM client while more robust (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, IMAP, and jabber) suffers from a clunkier interface, bugs, and a penchant for dropping.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed for now.

Ahh. technofetish. 😉

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