New Treo 700w

Okay, I took the plunge. Yesterday I drove over to the Verizon Store in Bellevue Square and got myself a brand new Treo 700w running Windows Mobile 5. I'm the type of person who generally prefers to order over the Internet, where I can carefully evaluate all my options. Too often I find the salespeople know less than I do, and I just don't have the patience to interact with a human that long.

But I got lucky. The salesperson who helped me knew exactly what I wanted, as he had clearly sold many Treo 700w's, and in about 15 minutes had me completely set up! He even arranged to cancel my contract with my previous carrier, letting me keep the old phone numbers, but making the entire process completely seamless. The final bill turns out to be about what I've heard is the cheapest you can get: a few hundred dollars for the device and a 2-year contract. I also bought an unlimited data plan because I know I'll use it every day quite a bit.

So now after unwrapping the device and playing with it for a few hours, I seem to have a few basic things working: complete internet and MSN access (with Hotmail), send/receive with my Exchange Server, synchronization with my TabletPC. I also have noticed a few annoyances that I wonder if other people have solved:

• Verizon charges 10 cents per message for text messaging! In spite of my all-you-can-eat data plan. What gives? My old phone (and cheaper monthly plan) let me receive text messages from friends for free, and I had it set up to alert me when I received urgent messages. Now that costs way too much. Verizon wants me to pay another $5/mo for that. Come on!
• Email is plain text in both send and receive. How lame is that? I have all this browsing power and yet I can't even click on an embedded hyperlink in a message.

But those are just nits for me right now. It's just too cool to be able to instantly access hi-speed Internet from wherever I am.