I remember years ago saying, "I want my phone to be a phone. Nothing more than a phone. Nothing less." I suppose to a degree that's true, except I am not buying a phone anymore. I am purchasing a Personal Device. A device upon which I will rely for many aspects of my life. I will use this device for my telephone, yes. But I will use it for SMS, MMS, a camera in a pinch. I will use it for a calendar, for a phone book, for a note pad. I will use it to get directions to wherever I'm going, to figure out where I want to be going. I might even use the right one for some music.

In realizing this I have been forced to re-evaluate my choices and opinions regarding my purchases. I have to break out of the paradigm of a phone just being a phone and start to accept how much more than that it can be. Then I have to determine how much of that I want. In doing so, I have begun to understand more of the hype around new phones and features. There are so many and varied different things for these devices. Those that I listed above are the ones that matter to me. And to others? The office suite. The fact that they can do presentations from their phone. The fact that they have a home theater in their pocket. Things like that.

I have to begin to think of my Smart Phone differently. I have to think of what I want it to be. Design my own in my mind, and define why.

I will start by defining my priorities better.

- First and foremost, my phone is a phone. I need it to be good at being a phone - quality in sound is a must. Speaker phone is a must for me because, well, I use it. The ability to use Bluetooth hands-free devices is critical for my success. Battery life is important to me - I need to be able to actually use my phone regularly throughout a day and not run out of battery before it ends.

- My Personal Device is my communications hub when I am not at home or at a computer. Quality SMS, MMS, and Email support is critical.

- My Personal Device will be my organizer. Long gone are the days when a Palm Pilot was a new thing. My personal device has this functionality in it and it works well. It must be able to synchronize with my computer(s) in both directions. This means at a minimum it must have Mac support. It is preferable that this support be built-in with iSync, but I will accept it if there is a high quality third-party application that integrates with iSync. Either way, I will only accept the use of iSync. Linux support would be neat but is not required.

I must be able to sync my calendars and my address book. It would be good to be able to synchronize my to do list, too. I must be able to sync my address book. I must be able to take notes for later review quickly and easily.

- My Personal Device must be customizable; it needs to support a variety of third party applications and, possibly, to allow me to write my own. This includes apps like Google Maps, which I do rely on regularly, or PuTTY.

Knowing that these are my basic requirements, let's talk about interface. Qwerty keyboards are a requirement for me, so that eliminates a few Smart Phones right there. This leaves a two basic interfaces: devices that are driven by the dial pad and devices driven by a touch screen.

For me, devices with a dial pad are fantastic and provide a strong degree of one-handedness (is that a word?). It means that if for some reason I must send an SMS or look up directions while driving, I can. It'll be with some difficulty, and I strongly recommend against such an act as it is unsafe and in some states I'm sure illegal, but it's a whole lot easier than doing it with a two-handed device. Additionally, there are many devices with dial pads that can be manipulated to reveal a qwerty keyboard - the best of both worlds.

A device with a touch screen used to be boring and annoying for me. I hated them. Then came the iPhone. They re-thought the entire interface. Still, though, the lack of a physical keyboard is too much for me. Enter HTC. HTC's Touch interface is beautiful. While it is a tad lacking, I hope that they continue to run with it in the Kaiser and make even more improvements. When they do, I suspect that this would be a very usable interface and comparable to the iPhone. It might not be quite as pretty, but it will be every bit as usable. And, I admit, it's a whole lot prettier than the basic interface.

I think the question in my mind is where the technology is going. It seems like the world wants touch screens, so perhaps my next device should follow that trend. But I just can't quite give up the mechanical keyboard, even if it's just the qwerty one.

For me, if I can program a certain missing feature into my Nokia E70 I'm going to stick with it for a while. Tempting though it may be to switch, none of the upcoming phones I've seen support both frequencies T-Mobile has earmarked for 3G use in the states. That's a downer for me.

Let's see what comes next.