What's a good replacement for the Palm Smartphone?

You can get the Palm Pre via parallel importers, so there is no particular reason to miss out on it.

Is the 100gms weight really that important? Nearly all the good phones I could recommend weigh more than that...

If you can set that aside here are a few to think about:

Windows Mobile - I can only really recommend the HD2 at this point (WinMo really needs a decent hardware platform to run off, and a Snapdragon 1Ghz CPU backed by 448MB of RAM, or 576 if you want to unlock the rest of the RAM with custom firmware) does the trick. Has a good Palm emulator for this platform, if thats something that would be useful to you in terms of keeping some of your legacy software needs covered (Styletap). At the present time there is nothing better than the HD2 on the horizon, so if you went WinMo you should be qutie happy with this handset for some time to come. Available in XT and Voda flavors.

Symbian - quite a few alternatives, best in class being the Samsung i8910, although the Sony Satio, Nokia 5800, or Nokia N97 mini are all worth a look too. For non-touch screen devices the Nokia N86 is very good, as is the E72, and although its aging now, the N82 is also a very fine handset with a particularly good camera. Symbian also has Styletap available. The Sony Ericson Vivaz is due for release reasonably soon, so if you were finding the Symbian OS appealing it might be worth waiting to see how that handset turns out. All of these, with the exception of the i8910, and N82, come in XT and Voda flavors.

Android - the Nexus One is good, probably edging out the Milestone on account of its improved hardware spec. There are quite a few good Android handsets coming soon though (HTC Bravo, Sony X10, Motorola Motoroi, Samsung Galaxy 2), so I would tend to advise waiting and seeing how they all pan out before shelling out. Nexus One is vodafone only, as is the Milestone (although its US counterpart, the Droid, may work on XT - you'd need to check on that).

Maemo - the Nokia N900. Pretty good hardware platform, although not quite up there with the current top brass, very immature software/UI platform. Its a good device, but I wouldn't recommend it to most users at the moment, unless they love to tinker endlessly with tweaks/beta softwares etc. A little rough around the edges still, and for basic telephony lagging Vs every other handset I've mentioned. Vodafone only.

Of all the handsets above I've owned the HD2 (my current handset), i8910, N82, 5800, N900, and in addition used the Satio, and E71 (the E72s slightly older sibling), a fair amount too - just so you know that I have hands on experience with the majority of those phones.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, MWC is coming up in like a fortnight, so I would probably defer committing to any new handset until after that, unless you need one ASAP.

bernardgbailey

NZtechfreak