After several months of planning and deliberation, today I went over to the AT&T Wireless store and picked up a couple of new phones. A Sony-Ericsson T616 for me and a T306 for Laura. I like buying new toys, so this was lots of fun. And now I have a phone with GSM, a Web browser, Bluetooth, a color screen, built-in camera, and other cool things I didn’t have before. I’m not quite sure if any of these things will make me any more productive, entertained, or fashionable than before, but for the moment I feel good. And thanks to Apple‘s corporate account with AT&T, I got 45% off of my phone, and Laura’s was free.

Bluetooth is neat. Using iSync, I uploaded all my address book information from my Mac into the phone in just a few minutes, without even touching the phone (it was across the room, charging). It’ll be nice to have all my phone numbers at the tip of my fingertips; it was a little tedious having to look them up in my Palm or computer and then type the numbers into the phone (the numbers I called frequently I could program into my old phone, but there was no way to add my whole contact list).

When it works, iSync is actually pretty neat; all my computers at home, at work, my Palm, and now my phone, get the same phone and address information. When using Mac OS X, it’s even cooler, since other applications (like Mail and iChat) automatically pick up the information and use it when appropriate.

Friday, iSync even helped us have lunch: A bunch of us from work were going out to lunch, and I suggested Thai Basil, in downtown Sunnyvale. We took two cars, and drove off. Well, we showed up, but our other party was nowhere to be seen. It turns out (we learned later), that Thai Basil has two locations, within two blocks of each other, and we had each gone to a different one, not knowing about the other.

After arriving at our restaurant, waited for several minutes, but they didn’t show up. It would have been good if we could contact the others, but I didn’t know any of their phone numbers. iSync to the rescue! Several weeks earlier, I had copied all of our group’s info from the internal Apple directory into Address Book on my work computer. Since then, that information had made it (via repeated applications of iSync) from my work machine to .Mac to my home machine, where it was synched to my Palm, which was in my pocket. So it turned out I, quite unexpectedly, had some cell phone numbers in my Palm, and we were able to figure out the Thai Basil confusion and eat; the food was good, but quite spicy—I got mine prepared “mild;” I expect “hot” would have made my head explode.

Wow, this entry is much longer than I had expected it would be. And I seem rather rambling and not terribly coherent. Whee! Maybe I should just remove this paragraph. It’s pretty useless.