Palm

So I got an iPhone. I hate me. A little more so after finding out that Apple is now locking out selected platforms. But my logic was this:

1. The price dropped $200 and the 4GB model was being discontinued, so this looked to be a limited opportunity to get one at this price. To all of those crying that they got ripped off, shut up, this is the way technology has always worked, you can't bitch that you didn't have the money to splurge on the iPhone when you clearly did and did so of your own free will. There was no iGun pointed at your head.
2. Ever since I parted with my Palm Vx, I've wanted a PDA.
3. I had an iPod nano, got it for free with my latest purchase, a MacBook Pro, and promptly sold it on eBay, along with my old MacBook, to help fund the purchase of the MacBook Pro. (I upgraded because Aperture really needs a respectable GPU.) But I've always wanted a portable digital music player. Hell, I've been subscribed to the Lullabot podcasts for over a year and never really sat down at my computer to listen to them.
4. My cell phone sucks. No, really. It's an old Sony Ericsson T610. My parents try to call me from time to time and it ends up being a three minute shouting match of "What?! I can't hear you!" back and forth. Now, where I flat out got "no carrier" I get two to three bars out of five.
5. I can sync not only my podcasts, video (read: TV shows) and music to it, but also my Aperture photos. Or rather, automagically scaled down JPEGs of either all or specific projects or smart folders (e.g., five stars, photos tagged Allie, etc).
6. I can violate my TOS and tether it to my MacBook Pro for when I can't violate someone's open access point.
7. I can install an ssh client on it and remote admin a server from pretty much anywhere. I would have loved to have had this back when I was running a business, this would have been wonderful.

If I were to purchase individual devices to take care of 2, 3 and 4, I could probably spend less than $300. I'd probably spend more to get exactly what I wanted. Instead, I got this. I'm pretty happy with it, though things like closed source, no SDK, etc. don't make me happy. So I hate myself a bit. Especially when people are coming up to me about it at random. Ick. Being "cool" because of an Apple product drives me bananas.

And I plan to offset the extra that will appear on my cell phone bill by switching over to Linode as a VPS from my currently crappy (and unnamed intentionally) provider. The guys at Linode are just great. I'm probably going to sell a camera lens and buy a cheaper one to make up for the cost of the iPhone itself.