Reader D.K. says: I’ve been reading your blog and site for some time, and am one of the myriad people who greatly appreciate the lengths you’ve gone through to help us plebieans disseminate the complexities of what’s now the WM platform.After being cursed with the imate sp5 (and wm5 for smartphones – what a crock), I’ve decided that I’m going to switch over to a full fledged wm5 pda-phone. I’ve got my eyes set on the htc p3600 (trinity), but it’s still stuck using the samsung 400mhz processor and worse yet, has only 64mb of ram. You had mentioned that a few manufacturers are producing and will soon produce 256mb phones, and I was wondering if you knew if HTC has any underway. It would be a shame to spend nearly $800 only to discover that the phone is obsolete a few months later.

D.K.: Thanks for the kind words. But, you might have read about upcoming phones with 256MB RAM at some other site. Generally speaking, I tend not to write about rumors and unreleased products? Why? (cough, cough)… Mostly because I don’t catch wind of many rumors or get juicy insider tidbits 🙂

That said, the HTC P3600 is a pretty nice looking Pocket PC Phone Edition. I would not be too concerned about the 400MHz Samsung chip. You will probably find it quite acceptable. I’ve got two first generation Windows Mobile 5 Phone Edition units: An iMate K-JAM (195MHz) and an iMate JasJar (520MHz). While the JasJar is definitely much faster than the somewhat pokey K-JAM, the K-JAM is quite usable. I usually carry the K-JAM around as my daily use Pocket PC (I use an SDA as my phone).

I also don’t find the 64MB RAM a limitation. However, I tend not to install a lot of apps on either my Pocket PC or Smartphone. And, I keep all my data on a 1GB mini-SD. So, I haven’t felt any storage crunch issues yet.

Of course, unless you must-a-gotta get a new phone now, it always pays to be be patient and wait for the usual round of announcements of new phones that seem to come out in Spring and Summer.