Droid

We are now Verizon customers with Droids. She surprised me by giving up on the Blackberries we looked at while shopping. The tipping point was probably when our Verizon salesman, who was stuck using a Blackberry, said he would "punch his mother in the face" for a Droid.

My favorite apps are Dolphin Browser, Shazam!, WeatherBug, and a host of various do-dads that do anything you can imagine.

The open standards used on the platform was very attractive to me. For example, I do not need to use iTunes to upload music onto the thing, and can play AAC, Flash, MP3, MP4 and even OGG-Vorbis (my favorite portable format). The only thing I might like is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), which is promised soon.

Of the other phones, I would imagine the Google Nexus One is terrific and the HTC Eris is a good mid-priced solution.