I recently found myself in the market for a smartphone. Today's selection of smartphones is pretty miserable, if I may say: gPhones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and a bunch of Windows Mobile handsets. Instead of producing good-quality smartphones, it seems like the cellphone industry is focused on on creating more useless features and less usable gadgets. So, presenting a decent smartphone:
The Handspring Visorphone was arguably the first commercially successful "smartphone" (before that, Nokia had a few communicators, and Kyocera had created what was essentially a Palm III with a phone kludged onto the bottom). Seeing as we already had a Visor Deluxe handheld laying dormant for the past four years, I decided to order a Visorphone and give it a try. I've always been a fan of Palm OS: it's dead simple, it's functional (it actually has copy and paste, unlike modern smartphones), the Graffiti input language is much faster than an on-screen keyboard, and even at 20MHz with 2MB of system memory it's fast. Compare that to my father's Windows Mobile handheld today, which has a 216MHz CPU and 128MB of memory and struggles to load just about anything.
One of the major selling points for the Visorphone over a Treo 650 (my second choice) was that the phone part slides into an expansion slot on the back. That also means I can deatch the phone part and continue to use the organizer when a phone may not be appropriate (read: school, theater, restaurant, etc). Unfortunately for me, that also means that it has its own battery, which didn't ship with the phone. I ended up spending an afternoon creating an appropriate battery pack using some solder, spare wire, duct tape, and the battery pack to my old cellphone, a Motorola v60i (you can see how that went over here).
As far as usability is concerned, the Visorphone keeps with the rest of the Palm OS interface. It installs an enhanced address book, which is essentially the same as the built-in one but with dialing support, as well as the phone application itself, a SIM phonebook synchronization utility, and an SMS utility that works like e-mail. The Visorphone also doubles as a 14.4k voice modem, which is useful if I wanted to install an app to send and receive e-mail, but didn't want to pay for expensive cellular data.
I'm still getting used to actually carrying it...