Well I finally broke down and bought a new phone to replace my current one which has a wonderful cracked screen. I wanted to try out a fancy phone for a change that can do all sorts of fun stuff like browse the internet and utilize Google’s Mobile Apps. I struggled to decide between a Curve and a Storm. The Curve looks really nice and is a good size. It has most of the features I wanted, however, it didn’t have GPS available for google apps, which is what I really wanted. The Storm is a touch screen based phone that is suppose to compete with the IPhone, but really doesn’t quite match up. The touch screen’s click feature apparently is hard to get used to at first and people said the software was slow and buggy. They did also say that it was a great phone and that you get used to the touch screen interface and most of the reviews about the slow software were like a year old and new software updates have probably fixed most of those issues by now.

I ended up buying the Storm yesterday and they had a promotion running that had free overnight shipping. I wish FedEx delivered on Saturday, because its currently sitting in Great Falls and I have to wait until Monday to get it so instead I’m writing about my new phone in anticipation of its arrival.

So, what can a person do with this fancy new technology

• Email
• Mobile Web
• Maps
• Latitude

I think that out of those apps, Maps and Latitude are probably the coolest. You open the Google Maps application and click on locate me and then maps locates you on google maps via your GPS location. This is cool because you can use that location to search for things near by you such as Restaurants, gas stations, Grocery Stores, or you can get directions to any address from your current location.

Now with Latitude you can setup a friends list of other people who have similar devices with Latitude installed and you can look on a map and see where all your friends are. Some people may not like that idea due to personal privacy issues or what not, but I’m not too worried as you don’t have to export your location to the entire world if you don’t want to. I’m planning on building my own app for traveling that utilizes Google Maps. Well, if I become motivated enough to do it that is.