I’ve had it. You’ve failed me for the last time, Win­dows Mobile. My Touch Pro is stripped down to just about stock. Noth­ing more installed on it than GPS Today, WMWiFiRouter and Ever­note. And still, it’s slower than my iPod Touch, freezes more than my iPod Touch, and using the touch­screen is less respon­sive and pre­cise than my iPod Touch. In fact, since get­ting my iPod Touch, I’ve been con­sis­tently amazed at how much I put up with from Win­dows Mobile, how much I just accepted as “the way things work” because I didn’t know any better.

Well, I’m done. Win­dows Mobile, even with HTC’s Touch­Flo 3D or even the new Spb Mobile Shell 3.0, isn’t good enough com­pared to the com­pe­ti­tion. 6.5 won’t be appre­cia­bly bet­ter, because they didn’t fix the right things (a shinier UI doesn’t mean squat over the same crappy mem­ory man­age­ment) and Win­dows Mobile 7, due in late 2010 maybe, brings a whole new set of issues. If I’m going to switch plat­forms, I may as well do it now.

iPhone 3G 16GB for $150, an offer I can’t refuse?

AT&T has a pretty sweet deal going on right now. I can get a refur­bished 16GB iPhone 3G for only $150, deliv­ered 2-​day right to my door (which, now that I’m liv­ing in a house, I actu­ally have). Order it Mon­day, and I could be set­ting it up when I get home from work Wednes­day night, give me some­thing to do while I’m installing Win­dows 7 RC (which comes out on the 5th). That’s really not a bad deal at all, and I still have an iPod Touch I could sell and recoup some of that (or just give it to my 13-​year-​old niece who has already cracked the screen on the net­book she got for xmas). And word on the street is that you can even get AT&T to credit your account to off­set any early ter­mi­na­tion fee from the car­rier you’re leav­ing. I really can’t see a down­side to this. I even like the fact that it’s a refurb, mean­ing an actual human being has gone over it and said, “Yes, this is okay to sell.”

Wait­ing for Godot, er, iPhone HD

My orig­i­nal plan, such as it was, was to use the iPod in con­junc­tion with my Touch Pro until June 8th, the first day of WWDC, Apple’s World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence. This is when they’re expected to offi­cially release iPhone OS 3.0 to the unwashed masses, and every­one expects them to unveil shiny new hard­ware as well. Both gen­er­a­tions of iPhones were released at WWDC and went on sale shortly there­after, in late June or early July. For a while now, the spec­u­la­tion has been that they were going to release a new, HD-​capable and maybe even HD screened iPhone, some­thing to com­pete more directly with the newer 800×480 HTC devices. But in the last week or so, that rumor has lost steam.

Look, I have no idea what Apple’s going to do. Nei­ther, frankly, does any­one else out­side of Cuper­tino. And maybe Kevin Rose. But any­one else, it’s just edu­cated guesses. Some­times you can get a long way on edu­cated guesses, but they’re still guesses (see: dif­fi­culty in actu­ally mak­ing any accu­rate pre­dic­tions in cli­mate sci­ence). We just don’t know, and bas­ing my pur­chas­ing deci­sions on what I think Apple might do isn’t the best way to go. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll see only minor changes at best to the iPhone 3G, maybe col­ored backs. The HD stuff will go into a new Apple iPad a lit­tle smaller than the Kin­dle, but all screen. Nice, but not a phone. So for my money, a cheap iPhone 3G is as good now as in July.

Wither Pre?

Of course, the other rea­son to wait was to see the Palm Pre in per­son, to pon­der it’s pock­etable per­fec­tion (I’m a sucker for allit­er­a­tion, sue me). But the more I learn about the Pre, espe­cially in rela­tion to what I’m learn­ing about the iPhone, the less inter­ested I become. For one thing, I have come to loathe and despise slid­ers. The Pre is a ver­ti­cal slider, so it’s slightly less oner­ous than my Touch Pro in that you don’t have to wait for the screen to rotate, but lack­ing an on-​screen key­board you still have to pop it open even for triv­ial text entry, like pass­words. Ask any G1 owner how long that takes to get old.

The uncer­tainty about appli­ca­tion avail­abil­ity is another stick­ing point for me. I know what’s avail­able for the iPhone, and have made lots of pur­chases from the iPhone App Store already (includ­ing spend­ing at least $50 already in soft­ware I’ve since replaced with alter­na­tives, but that’s all part of explor­ing a new plat­form). The webOS App Cat­a­log, how­ever, is still a mys­tery. We know some of the play­ers that will have apps ready for launch, but a lot of the really impor­tant ones for me are still ques­tion marks. Will eReader have their reader app ready for launch? How about Ever­note? We don’t know.

So between dis­com­fort with the hard­ware and uncer­tainty with the soft­ware, I’m more and more inclined to give the Pre a pass. And I’m def­i­nitely ready to leave Sprint, so that’s another point in the “no Pre for me” col­umn. Which brings me back to get­ting an iPhone 3G, and the sooner the better.

The Palm Eos, my other smartphone

Of course, we also got some news this week that allows me to hedge my bets. I’m the kind of guy who ran out of fin­gers hold­ing “undo” places in Choose Your Own Adven­ture nov­els back in the 80s. I like to keep my options open, have an escape hatch. And Palm may pro­vide me just that. We got a leaked ren­der of another webOS device this week, what many are call­ing the Palm Eos. This front fac­ing QWERTY can­dy­bar phone is clearly the replace­ment for the Cen­tro, and should retail at $350 before car­rier dis­count­ing, putting it some­where between $100 – 200 with con­tract. It’s taller than the Pre but much thin­ner, very sim­i­lar in form fac­tor to the iPhone. It kind of looks like a Treo Pro with longer screen (320×400, shorter than the iPhone or Pre, but longer than the Treo). And it’s a GSM device using the AT&T UMTS bands.

So, in the­ory, I could buy an iPhone 3G now, upgrade it to the 3.0 firmware in June, and then down the line buy an Eos for $350 off con­tract. Then I could swap my SIM card (it will be nice to be back on a net­work that uses them again, CDMA ESN swaps just aren’t the same) back and forth between them depend­ing on whether I want the all touch screen expe­ri­ence of the iPhone or the mix of capac­i­tive touch and always avail­able QWERTY of the Eos. Best of both worlds, and on the same account. Both sync with Google, so my data’s the same either way, espe­cially if I have Ever­note on both as well.

And I’ll finally be rid of Win­dows Mobile and all the annoy­ances it’s brought me. And that’s a good deal no mat­ter which way you slice it.