This IS the Droid I'm looking for, Obi-Wan!

I have been a smartphone user for almost 5 years now. I got my first one, a Kyocera 7135, when I was a new mom fresh off of maternity leave. I completely forgot about a very important morning meeting with a client, two days after forgetting about our weekly staff meeting (can we say MAJOR mommy-brain!?!?), and my boss pretty much insisted that I get a PDA. I have always been a bit of an obsessive technophile, and found the thought of carrying around two devices (cell phone and PDA) reprehensible. So I got a smartphone. They were fairly uncommon back then. But from the beginning I was hooked. I think it was even more useful for organizing my personal life/home responsibilities than it was for work. (And it was very useful for work!)

Not even year later, when my device started acting squirrely, my TEC insurance replaced it with a Palm Treo 650. Apparently the 7135 was not compatible with the new 911 rules and was no longer being supported. It was a decent phone, and had much better multimedia capabilities. I was very happy. A year and a half ago, my cell phone carrier was offering the Palm Treo 755 for $99. I also had a new-every-two credit of $100 on my account, so I was able to upgrade phones for free. The 755p was old technology by the time I got it, and what I really (really, REALLY) wanted was the new Palm Treo Pro, but it was $200 and required an additional data plan of $50/month. Since I was now a stay-at-home-mom, I pretty much had to go with the free one. Yes, it was old technology, but not as old as the one I had been using. It was a little faster, a little more responsive, and I was still mostly happy.

But I knew what I was missing. I wanted a phone with GPS. I wanted a phone with a bigger screen. As big as the whole device. I wanted a phone with a fast web browser. A FULL web browser. (Yes, even though I never used it. I still *wanted* it!) I wanted a phone with voice recognition. I wanted a phone that was pretty much a mini-computer. I also wanted it to be a Palm, since I've been a happy customer of theirs for so long, but it seemed that Verizon was no longer carrying any of their products.

A few months ago I was thinking about switching to Sprint, to save a little money on my monthly bill, and if I did, I was going to get the newest Palm phone, the Palm Pre. Luckily, I had the good sense to ask my FaceBook friends who were Sprint users what they thought. About 80% of the replies I got were people who detested Sprint and got away from them (or plan to) as soon as they could. I also found out that a friend who lives in a more populated area of Louisiana than my parents, has very spotty service with Sprint. That was pretty much a deal-killer. Too bad, too. We would have saved over $50/month, even adding data plans. I guess you get what you pay for...

Just for kicks, I also went to the AT&T store and looked at the much-lauded iPhone. I probably would have been impressed with it if I had not been using a PDA phone for years. I liked the multimedia capabilities. But overall, it just didn't impress me. I think the thing that bugged me the most about it was that it didn't have a memory card slot. Also, I really didn't want to switch to AT&T after all the grief they gave my father-in-law about wanting to charge him hundreds of dollars for breaking his contract when he wanted to cancel my MIL's phone after she died.

Over the past year I'd browsed through Verizon's "smartphone" offerings - BlackBerries, more BlackBerries, HTCs... They were all decent enough phones. But nothing had everything I wanted in it. Nothing jumped out at me and said "I'm the phone to have!!!"

Until now.

The "Droid." A full-phone screen. A phone with Google's Android operating system. A phone with voice-commanded GPS. A phone that multi-tasks. A phone with a 5mp camera with a flash and image stabilization. Aside from not being a Palm product (and since Palm is apparently a dying company, I'm not sure that even matters any more) it is exactly the smartphone I've been looking for. And then some.

Too bad I'm not eligible for an upgrade discount until March.

The other night I went in to the Verizon store to see it. I thought surely it couldn't be as fast and as awesome as all the hype. I thought, if I looked at it, the schoolgirl crush I had on it would be broken, and I'd realize I could wait until March (or later) for the price to come down, and to be eligible for my discount. It was a good idea right? Only, the phone really was that fast. And really was that cool. And I still can't stop thinking about it.

So if you weren't quite sure what to get me for Christmas... well, now you know. ;)