I’ve recently been looking at smartphones which could possibly replace my old and trusty Nokia 6310i (which I got for P13,000 or $270 USD back when it was still being sold brand new).

I’ve tried using a Nokia E61 and a Nokia N90 but I never really got around to liking those two compared to my Nokia 6310i. I guess it’s mainly because I don’t use my phone much other than for texting or calling. Sometimes I actually barely even use it.

Recently two smartphones have caught my eye, not that I necessarily will be power-using them but hey, who doesn’t want all there eggs in one basket nowadays?

The Nokia E71 caught my eye because it’s now reportedly available in Black Steel. I have actually tried holding one and it was pretty hard to type on compared to my previous Nokia E61 which had nicely spaced keys and not all crammed up side-by-side like the E71, but hey, it’s black.

On the software side, the Nokia Symbian S60 3rd edition platform certainly has quite a handful of available software which are nifty in doing certain tasks but sometimes you just wish you had a touchscreen to go with it.

I’ve also gotten to use a couple of PocketPC’s since I used to sell mobile phones in the past and it was certainly nice to be able to load all those PC-like applications onto a compact device. Plus hey, there’s a touchscreen to boot. Takes some getting used to if you need to do SMS though, and the battery life on those things were just awful! My Nokia 6310i lasts for a week before I need to recharge it while these PocketPC’s require charging every 24 hours or less!

Looking into the current PocketPC/PDA line-ups, only the HTC Touch series has caught my eye. I ruled out the HTC Touch Pro because it was thick and it pretty much reminded me on an Altoids tin can. QWERTY on the HTC Touch Pro is definitely good but can’t they at least try to figure out a way to not put some extra depth into the device?!

Meanwhile, the HTC Touch HD looks particularly attractive because of the huge touchscreen just like the iPhone and it is spec’d like a monster except for the video recording aspect. How I wish they included some sort of QWERTY keyboard input though.

The user interface (the TouchFLO 3D part of it, not the boring Windows Mobile 6 part) of the HTC Touch HD is just jaw-dropping. It certainly is no iPhone but just look at it!

I’m certainly not quite sure if I’ll ever get my hands on any of these two devices but dreaming is free, right?