Through a confluence of events I am lucky to have lots of toys lately. The first event is a tragedy with a happy ending. As some of my readers may know, I’m into PDAs and up until recently was really excited about getting an HP iPAQ hw6515 PDA/phone to replace my aging h4155 PDA.

Well the other day my wife was using my PDA for something and she laid it on the stairs to my sons’ bunk bed. Little precarious wooden step about five feet from the floor. You know where this is going… I knocked into it and down it went. It’s survived falls like this before, but what happened is that it hit one of the lower steps and another wooden stool nearby. Solid wood is harder than carpet, and the LCD cracked.

Bad news, that’s $160 to replace. Good news, I just sold it on eBay for $77 as-is. Better news, we decided I would get my Xmas present a bit early. After much much much deliberation, I decided not to go for the HP due to a few serious drawbacks it has. I started shopping around for other devices and settled on the Sprint PPC-6700.

Cool stuff. Windows Mobile 5, funky slide-out keyboard, decent amount of RAM. And of course the big thing my last PDA didn’t have–a phone. So far I find it a little harder to use as a phone than your basic mobile phone, but not that big of a deal. Main drawback is that without a hardware phone keypad I can’t dial numbers by touch anymore. Might look into voice dialing software to help with that. PDA-wise it is around the same speed as my previous one (~400mhz), but with a newer OS and other cool softwary stuff.

Incidentally, the best site I have found so far for the Sprint is pdaPhoneHome.com. They have really great forums.