Yeah, it’s a cheesy REO Speedwagon song title, but it does capture my current Smartphone dilemma. My “Jack Bauer” Treo is in reruns and the only way it will charge is slowly via its USB “Hotsync” cable. That’s fine when my computer is nearby. (Oh, nevermind. That’s always.), but a couple weekends ago when Kyle and I hit Gotham, I had to lug my laptop along just to trickle the Treo (that sounds dirty) with electricity.

Any cell phone decision is at least influenced, if not coercively controlled, by your carrier of choice, Verizon in my case. They make it difficult and expensive to extract yourself from their 100 year commitments, and therefore thorny for me to bolt for an iPhone and AT&T.; (The side-story is that Apple gave Verizon first dibs, but they couldn’t reach agreement… probably because “the network” probably wanted to kill the wi-fi capability in the new son of Jobs…)

So as I trickle my Treo, I suffer silently the indignity of snickers and sneers from the Blackberry mob at work and empathy from the few, daring iPhone users behind the corporate iron curtain. I like my LeoTreo. The phone works great, getting work email works fine most of the time, but the browser is a bowser and um, since I don’t really like talking to people on the phone, the internet experience is pretty high on my features list. That’s where the iPhone shines for me, especially the part where you can turn it on its side and the “accelerometer” turns all iWideScreen. That’s cool, but it’s on AT&T;, an inferior network to Verizon…

My hopes were high for the new Treo 800w to be released on Verizon, but sadly the fast little Windows Mobile unit doesn’t run on Verizon. It Sprints. Don’t even bring up the Palm Centro. Jack would rather be killed by terrorists than use that toy. From my clouds of disappointment a Storm began to form, and over the past ten weeks or so, I’ve been mercilessly teased by Research In Motion and Verizon about the Blackberry Storm. Now my pal Jeffro swears by his BB after years on a Treo. “It just works,” says Jeff, but he’s geekier than me for gadgets, loves his music, and lusts after an iPhone. Still, if our President-Elect can be Blackberry addicted, that’s cool enough for me.

Yesterday the so called “iKiller” Storm hit the shore, so after work I washed up to the local Verizon brick ‘n mortar to find out sold out was my out. I did get to play with a live one for about 30 minutes, mostly with the virtual keyboard, email and browser and testing the “accelerometer.” My hands on experience left me only B-List dazzled, like seeing Jennifer Aniston instead of Angelina Jolie. It was pretty hot, but a clumsy keyboard experience and a sluggish “accelerometer” give me pause to make sure they can fix stuff with software updates and be certain there are no hardware issues in these early models. Besides, they won’t have any more in stock until December 5th. That will give me time to get my hands on an iPhone demo.