GEEK WARNING! The latest mobile update

Some people have a car, clothes or house (not so much anymore) fetish. Well, I have a phone fetish. That's right. I'm forever in search of the perfect mobile phone. And the search goes on . . and on . . . and on . . .

Let me begin by saying, there is no "perfect" mobile phone for everyone. That's because everyone uses theirs in a different way and has different needs/expectations. Lynne is perfectly happy with her new white flip phone from AT&T. For her, it gets the job done and she's very happy. But, then again, she doesn't have a phone fetish. I'll save a discussion of her fetishes for another time.

With that intro, I'm admitting that I got my third new phone in three months. No, I don't still have the other two. They have been either sold on Craig's List or exchanged. My most recent phone was via exchange with AT&T and I have to admit it was the easiest phone exchange I've ever experienced. Used to be you piratically had to practically threaten legal action to get them to take back a phone. Happy to see we've progressed from there.

The new buy is the HTC Touch Pro, known by AT&T as the Fuze. It is the state of art in Windows Mobile 6.1 devices. It used a technology called TouchFlow, not to be confused with Multi touch (what the iPhone uses). And, it's definitely not to be confused with an iPhone. But, it does get the job done with some sweet benefits. For starters, the display is simply amazing and possibly better than the iPhone's. Crisp, clear and bright. Like that a lot. It has a slide out keyboard that is roomy and full featured with dedicated keys to many of the symbols and punctuation marks we all use. That makes it a little more chunky than a front facing qwerty phone, but so be it. Still fits in my jeans pocket.

You can either touch the screen or use the stylus, which is held in place with a cool magnet. The animated weather feature is cool and lets you save as many cities as you want for quick access. So I can quickly check the weather in London, St. Louis and Sydney. Touch scrolling is nice and works. Some of the other touch features are more fiddly and prone to drive you nuts. I find myself using the stylus quite a lot.

As for the phone itself, that part is very good. It has a feature called sidetone that I really like. It lets you hear your own voice through the phone's ear speaker, like a land line phone. My bluetooth headset (Plantronics 925) does this as well. Some people don't like it, but I do. Also, the bluetooth connection in my car is superb. It's loud and clear and better than either of the other two phones I have used in the car. If you don't have one of these hands free devices in your car, it's a must. You'll not only have a much better chance of avoiding a crash, but you'll find yourself using your phone a lot more to stay in touch with people.

The email (my main reason for not just having a phone phone) works well and I quickly set up my work email, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. It has a nifty graphical preview feature though to use it you have to master the anomalies of the TouchFlow system.

I think (hope) I'm set with this phone for some time. Palm has just announced a cool new phone that does use MultiTouch technology like the iPhone. It looks tempting, but for now is only available on Sprint and likely won't be available on AT&T given it's exclusive deal with Apple.