Aside from Andy's bachelorhood and our hotel room floor, the weekend's most tragic casualty was my phone. The screen had been misbehaving for a while, occasionally displaying useless garbage instead of meaningful content like Twitter messages about what people in California had for dinner. Flipping the screen up and down usually solved the problem, but not anymore. First it was stuck as gibberish; now it just doesn't show anything. I'm stuck with the aged t39m (monochrome!) pictured on the right.

So I guess I'd better get a new phone, huh? The iPhone's appearance is a little too recent, and my need to pay $200 to cancel a contract (I have two T-Mobile accounts thanks to LastCall) means that it's out of my price range. Besides, I don't want to have to compete with Yglesias in the making-hilarious-observations-about-iPhone-quirks game.

Right now I think I'll follow through on my threats to get an Ocean, even though Matt's review has been lukewarm. The platform's locked down in the same way as the Sidekick, and it's clear there are some problems that future firmware upgrades will have to be used to work out. But mostly it looks like what the Sidekick 3 should have been, except with a lousier keyboard. The lack of an SSH client gives me pause — it's pretty awesome to fix a website from your phone — but I imagine I can work out some horribly-insecure alternative with an IM interface or a Java applet. I plan commandeer my officemates' phones tomorrow — as a web developer I'm officially sanctioned with that power, and both the iPhone and Ocean are represented — then I guess I'll take the plunge.

Unless someone tells me that's a horrible idea, of course. Anybody?

OH YEAH: I should point out that although my venerable t39m is an excellent phone, it's a terrible everything else. So don't send me text messages until I get this worked out, if you don't mind — there's pretty much no chance I'll retrieve them on this thing.