Always with me. 12 May '05, 1.59pm PST.

I'm through with the Sidekick. It was a very reliable phone for email and instant messaging (with the exception of that 3 day outage). But the PIM just wasn't doing it for me and after my son started using it as a full time gaming device and accidentally tore off one its the rubber keys, I just gave it to him. T-Mobile told me they wouldn't be able to replace it for less than like $120. I've owned all three generations of Sidekicks. The last two had something become irreparably damaged within the first year. They've been very usable devices otherwise, but with the SKII, I noticed that web surfing became incredibly slow for some reason. Perhaps it had something to do with the proxy servers?

So now I'm sporting the i-mate JAM, seen above in my palm playing a compressed DVD. Below the phone is the Canon SD 20 digicam. Small, sweet devices that pack a lot of punch.

The Jam is incredible. I ebayed my iPaq a few months ago because I didn't like having to carry it around along with my phone. I thought maybe I'd wait around for those Motorola phones with iTunes or the 3 megapixel digicam built in, but I figured what I needed most wast the PIM features of a Pocket PC or Palm device. After a month of research, I was not impressed with the Treo and didn't like the huge candybar Pocket PCs.

The JAM is tiny for PPC phone. It's roughly the size of a 4th generation iPod. With the JAM, I can do everything I used to do on the iPaq -- watch compressed DVDs, listen to MP3s, email, calendaring, web browsing, etc. All that stuff. When I get a 1GB SD card I may even start carrying my iPod around less. Oh and it's got a crappy 1 megapixel camera too, but I can't deal with the low quality images these camera phones take, so I have to carry the SD 20 with me -- the perfect everywhere phone.

Email is working like a champ, checking both my gmail and regular POP accounts. Internet Explorer is also working well, although there were service problems on T-Mobile these past 2 days. I also got the Computer Devices SDIO WiFi card, which worked great around the house. So far so good.

Synching with my Mac has not been so smooth yet. PocketMac is sort of working right now, but the software hasn't been fully upgraded for Tiger. It's successful at synching my Address Book contacts, but iCal isn't synching yet. iSync isn't seeing the PPC yet either. Hopefully when the Tiger upgrade happens, this will be resolved. I can live with that for now.

Update: Pocket Mac Pro 3 and other PM apps were updated for Tiger. The download is free for licensed users and works like a charm with the JAM.

If you've got the dough to shell out for one of these puppies, I can highly recommend purchasing it through David Weineger, whom I found by sifting through JAM reviews on mobile phone forums. Don't be daunted by the site. He next day Fedexed it to me and was really great to deal with.