Fun with your Palm and your Nokia! Draw icons, write new ring tones, and connect your laptop/Palm to the Internet. The saleslady craftily talked me into buying a more expensive phone than I wanted, but I just realized that it saved me much more money in connectivity hardware for Palm-to-phone connectivity. Modems and cables would cost hundreds of dollars-- and I'm not even sure it'd work-- and with this phone I can just use the IR port.

I ultimately went with VoiceStream, for many reasons. Digital coverage is very decent--including all along I-90 between Seattle and Spokane, which I didn't know about until I got to the store. Their highly promoted $40/mo plan has more minutes than I could possibly use, and a reasonable overage rate. I could probably switch to their equally priced national no roaming plan and still not use any overage minutes. They provide GSM service, which is a world-wide technology standard, as opposed to many services' semi-proprietary technologies. The right balace of features, coverage and price for my uses, and recommendations from friends sold me on their service.

I'm already a little scared of my phone, though. The Nokia 8290 is extremely small, and I'm afraid of losing it. I'm also a little skeptical of reception; my boss tells me cell reception is terrible in the building where we work (walking into a conference room puts his dual-mode phone into analog roaming), and my call to customer service over that phone from my apartment was of dubious digital quality. (I'm still waiting for service activation, so I can't call anyone other than customer service at the moment.) Could just be the battery isn't fully charged. But we'll see.

I have 72 hours to get out of the year long commitment. 20 minutes of use to exchange the fancy phone. But I've got a feeling it'll all grow on me.