Phone Update

I neglected blogging for a while, so here's one important (smart)phone update...
My over two years old Palm PRE sort of died on me mid March: technically speaking you could still make calls with Bluetooth or headset, but shortly after reboot the phone would display notification that the volume setting was decreasing to zero. It looked like as if some invisible gnome was pressing volume down button constantly.
I was forced to shop for a new phone... I really liked WebOS, but new devices were not available on Sprint (and are still not listed as coming in the near future). Android was the only alternative, and because Sprint decided to charge all smartphones $10 surcharge to the normal plan (previously only for 4G phones), buying anything but the 4G phone made no sense.
Out of two HTC phones and one Samsung, I went for Samsung Epic 4G (from the famous Galaxy S series).
Beautiful Super AMOLED display and slide-out keyboard were the main factors, plus 16GB MicroDS card was included.
I'm happy with it so far - especially after the update to Android 2.2 (Froyo). Battery life could be better, but everything else works nice. It also confirmed my long term suspicion that Microsoft screwed up Hotmail API royally - you can read Hotmail messages on your phone if you are lucky, but status of the message, local delete and other normal features do not sync back to the web. I have seen it working exactly the same imperfect way on too many phones and operating systems to have any doubts.