After several years of being a loyal Palm customer, I had to let them go.

As electronic organizers go, I was kind of a late adopter. I bought my first one, a Palm III, right around 2000. Instantly, I was hooked. Compared to modern PDAs and phones, the Palm III is pretty simplistic — there’s no camera, no memory slot, and no color screen — but the ability to carry around my contacts, my calendar, and my notes was pretty exciting. A couple of years later I upgraded to a Palm Zire 72, a pretty fancy PDA that met and exceeded my needs. It had a large color display, a 1.3 megapixel camera, an SD card slot and more. I broke the screen on one and quickly replaced it, only to replace the replacement with a Palm Treo 650 smartphone.

Before I bought my Treo I looked like a stereotypical nerd, carrying around a PDA, a digital camera, and a cell phone with me at all times. The Treo replaced all those gadgets (the digital camera wasn’t great, but it worked in a pinch). With my Treo at my side, I was ready to take on the world … or, some such nonsense. I’d have to stretch to come up with functions I needed that the Treo couldn’t do. With my unlimited data plan I could check e-mail and surf the web no matter where I was. By using Documents to Go I was able to access all my gaming lists in both Excel and plain text formats on the road. In a pinch, I could even use my Treo as a cellular modem for my laptop.

Where the phone failed, however, was in being a phone. Right out of the box, the volume levels were so low that I had to buy a program just to boost them. You couldn’t use MP3s for ringtones, either; that required another program, as did voice dialing. The phone’s reception was lousy and the speaker phone was so lousy that the phone worked better as a speaker phone when the speaker phone option was turned off.

And then came the resets. Soft resets, hard resets, and physically removing the battery became regular occurances — so much, in fact, that over the past couple of months I haven’t bothered putting my Treo back into its carrying case. The most annoying bug was “the voice mail reset.” Sometimes, after receiving a voice mail, the phone would disconnect from the network (“PHONE: OFF”). When you tried to turn the phone on, it would crash, reboot, and still not join the network. This would go on for hours, during which the phone was unusable.

After one too many of these reboot sessions this past weekend, I drove to the AT&T store and picked out a new phone. I’d been doing some research due to recent phone-related frustrations, so I had a good idea of what I wanted before I went in. I had almost settled on the GPS-enabled CrackBerry when I noticed that Samsung’s BlackJack II also has a built in GPS. I liked the phone’s look and feel, and decided to take a plunge. So far, I’m glad I did. I enjoy the phone’s interface (it’s running Windows Mobile 6.0) and there seem to be just as many programs out there for it as there were for the Treo, something I was initially concerned about.

And, the phone works.