Thank you. This made bad news better. Well...I may be getting a Pre. Sprint is a God damned succubus.

@Bakari
Tee hee...he said back, you thought he said bottom. You got all mad. It was funny.

Yeah, the back has that badass speakerphone in it, so it needed some holes to let out sound. Why they went with a flame look for a business oriented phone is beyond me. I'll have to see it in the flesh (or plastic) before I judge.

Yeah, WinMo in the background, but with Rhodium Manila (TouchFlo 3D), you don't see it. Everything is skinned...notifications, task manager, menus, etc. The only time you ever go out into windows is if you use the start menu (which isn't necessary) or when you use email. The weakness here is it's winmo 6.1 for now, which makes the e-mail client suck. Winmo 6.5 has a much more finger friendly email interface. I'm running this version of manila (tweaked a bit) over winmo 6.5 on my diamond and it's great. I need a keyboard though, so I'll likely get this (on Sprint). Oh yeah, and it can play 640x480 divx/xvid just fine...haven't tried anything bigger.

+1
...season 3 is awesome as well. Apparently there's a Christmas special coming, followed by a season 4 next spring. The episodes in S3 with the "electric sex pants" and "friendface" (facebook spoof) were top shelf.

It's incredibly easy to re-design a phone from supporting GSM to CDMA and vice versa. Almost as easy as changing from European freqs to US freqs within GSM. Really. The whole problem is the manufacturer has to want to be in the US/Asian market. Otherwise, why bother putting out the cost to manufacture something new? It's easy to design, but it's still a different device, and thus it's expensive to manufacture unless you can make a whole lot of them at once.

As for your last sentence...do you think the Palm Pre for GSM is going to sell around the world? Haha yes. Also, the CDMA iPhone will do well for Sprint and VZW. You know Apple is going to make one, whether it's sooner or later, and it likely won't be exclusive to one carrier for more than 6 months...that whole mass production thing.

Fixing the economy...I say we lose the dollar and use netbooks as the international currency. For example, your new car might cost 100 Eee's or 75 MiniNotes or 5 of whatever Sony is making.

@XYIL
WinMo 6.5 + TouchFlo 3D (Rhodium version) is probably the best phone UI I've seen. The only major mobile OS I haven't tried out yet is WebOS. WinMo 6.5 on it's own is decent, but there is some functionality tweaks that would help. I don't like so swipe 3 times to get from the top to the bottom of a menu with 10 or so items in it for example. I don't really like the iPhone's OS, because it doesn't scale all that well. If I load a bunch of apps I end up with all these pages of icons that all look pretty similar. Unless you know where everything is, it gets a bit much. It's definitely slick and intuitive, but for something with 50,000 available apps, you'd think it'd organize them better. I never really care for Blackberry's OSes, but I haven't used the very newest. Android I haven't used quite enough to really evaluate. I really wish someone would design an OS like TouchFlo 3d Rhodium, but with more customization options. An RSS Feed tab would be great (versus the RSS Feed App I have). To be able to load your favorite apps directly in a tab would be sweet.

@YukonDawg
Well, maybe it'll kill SOME cellular companies...
Sprint owns 51% (or is it 55%) of Clear.

@andonemorething
WAP..."you keep saying this word, but I don't think it means what you think it means"

Sry, just didn't realize that Opera Mobile, Skyfire, IE Mobile 6, WebOS browser, Opera Mini (for dumbphones BTW) didn't provide "real HTML" access. I *can* however use Flash on my phone.

I apologize, but I don't know where I'm going with this comment...if only my phone had a compass!

@MFfan310: What's with the Sprint/WiMAX hate? Did WiMAX steal your girlfriend or something? It has it's advantages...for example, WiMAX chips are CHEAP and can easily be put into anything that currently has WiFi. I think LTE chips will cost more, and might require you to be on a contract. We'll see. Anyway, it'd be nice to have a laptop (for example) that has a WiFi/WiMAX chip standard with an option to put in an LTE chip if that works better for you (coverage, etc). WiMAX will likely be cheaper, easier to put into devices, and require no contract, whereas LTE will be more like current cellular data networks...pricey and on contract. It'll probably be faster than WiMAX though, unless the LTE group is talking up max speeds that are unachievable in read life.

WiMAX and LTE...can't we all just get along?