My boss surprised me the other day with a new phone. Nothing was particularly wrong with my old phone, but we had a bunch of these new Samsung phones due to some staffing changes so I got nominated for one. Ostensibly it's to make on-call easier since I'll be able to read and respond to emails without having to run home. Hopefully that will work out.

So far I think the phone will work out alright. It's fairly bulky, but so was my LG enV, so no big change there. The screen seems big enough to be functional, although it certainly has its limitations. Can't say I can see much solution there short of packing around a netbook though. I love finally being able to synchronize my calendar, something that in theory the enV can do but which Verizon (curse their souls) forcibly disabled. Mobile email also cool. I've installed some applications such as Facebook, Twitter, IRC, that may or may not be really useful in the long run but are fun to have around.

But of course there's bad news too. The battery life is not what I'd like it to be. I'm not sure how it compares to other smart phones since this is my first, but with any reasonably heavy usage I'm looking at charging it a few times a day, and that's going to be my usage pattern during on-call, so I'm a bit disappointed.

It also runs Windows Mobile. I was rather apprehensive about it, but so far it's doing better than I thought. I'd give it a solid mediocre (which is high praise from me).

The application support is disappointing, although not really unexpected. See, with a Free/Open Source background I expect high quality software to just be available for free. With Windows Mobile, yeah not so much. There are a few but they're somewhat hard to find. I could really use an apt-get if you know what I mean. This is an area where Linux users get pampered and it's tough to go without.

Those are the major drawbacks. The one other minor glitch I would mention is that whenever I'm connected to my wifi it constantly tries to bring up a data connection. Well what's the point of that? To get the thing (I named it Aristotle) to knock it off I set up a dummy ISP connection using the irDA port. Hee, hee.

It's a keeper so far. We'll see how I feel after I go on-call this weekend. If you see this blog full of Brittany Spears posts you'll know it's driven me off the deep end. Your pity is all I ask.