I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing – like a less whiney version of a certain young Jedi I’ve embraced the dark-side and bought a Windows Mobile 5 device.

The catalyst was Polly breaking her Palm; it happens, but it shouldn’t. The cursed thing decided no way was it going to reboot. Soft-reset? Nope. Warm-reset? Yeah, but locked up. Hard-reset? Hah, you should be so lucky. And so the end result was that I dismantled the bloody thing and pulled the battery cable out: all fixed.

Now this is a sad indictment of the Palm. Yes, you could blame the fact that it’s a 3 year old device, but while hunting for solutions I discovered multiple instances of people having the same problem with the Tungsten E2. What’s worse is that since the E2 uses non-volatile memory you can’t just solve the problem by waiting for the battery to discharge (or by disconnecting it). Add to this the lack of innovation in the Palm camp (the TX has 4mb stack – my three year old T3 has 10mb) and the slow, painful death that is Palm OS Garnet (ah, the glorious days when Cobalt was an exciting and inevitable possibility) have left me feeling somewhat stuck in a rut.

And so what to get instead? This has been a problem for a while. The TX was a disappointed, the X50/51 was superbly powerful but apparently somewhat buggy, and didn’t consolidate any of my devices. The P910i was cheap but underpowered (and now end-of-lifed, in a significant amount of time in advance of 2006′s P990i) and the Nokia devices were sorely lacking in keyboard. And until last week the Windows Mobile options were lack-luster as well – WM2003 and no WiFi.

This week, however, has seen the UK appearing of the HTC Wizard aka the T-Mobile Vario (and the Orange Cwhatever and the O2 something else). Now, if you can survive the tacky T-Mobile pink, you can have a WM2005 device that’s 3/4 the volume of my T3 with 802.11g (although rumour has it T-Mobile crippled it to 802.11b), BlueTooth 2.0, GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 40Mb of data a month and 200 minutes for about 400 quid over 18 months. Neat.

The downside: my number isn’t transferred until the 2nd of December. The other downside: there’s no Mac solution for WM2005 as yet, so syncing with my Powerbook is not an option until a compliant version of MissingSync or PocketMac appears. Ah, such trials…