After 6+ hours of trying to get the T-Mobile Wing to play music last night and a couple more hours of going at it again today I decided that Windows Mobile 6 and I just don't get along. It was a bit more frustrating and violent than all that, but the phone survived long enough for me to take it back to the store and exchange it. My old flip phone didn't make it through the day, though. It gave up the ghost as a sacrifice to my e-rage. It is far better to throw the free phone than the $300 one. I did some reading online and found that my problems with the Wing are not uncommon, and it seems to be mostly the fault of the Windows Mobile operating system. I really liked the touch screen and the stylus, but with none of the programs working correctly I couldn't live with the phone anymore. If I spend $300 on a phone I expect it to dance and sing when I tell it to.

So I took the phone back and exchanged it for a Blackberry Curve, which had generally good reviews. So far so good. I really wish it had a touch screen, as scrolling through web pages with the trackball gets a bit tedious. But I think there are buttons you can push to make it scrill a bit faster. The software disc actually worked when I put it into my computer so I didn't have to search some website for the software I needed, a step up from the Wing's software disc. My music files loaded up without any trouble and played when I wanted them to. The songs I loaded into my ringtones folder work as ringtones, and they can be used in my alarm clock mode. The rest of the utilities are fairly intuitive, moreso than those on the Windows O/S. The keypad is a bit small, but I have skinny fingers so that's not really an issue for me. All in all it seems to be a much better phone than the Wing. I really wish the Wing would have worked out, and I think that with a different operating system it would, but I can't handle the frustration of the Windows software. And since the Blackberry is $50 cheaper than the Wing I was able to get a Bluetooth headset for my wife's phone. That way she can crochet and talk to her family or listen to music at the same time.

On a gaming-related note, I bought a pair of Crystalhide Handwraps and a couple of Delicate Living Rubies for my World of Warcraft character. Hopefully I will finish upgrading my character to a sufficient level before the expansion comes out. There is no release date set for it yet, but I would like to have sweet epic gear in all of my gear slots sooner rather than later. Most of my gear isn't wxtremely awesome, but I'm working on acquiring all the stuff that is relatively attainable for a solo player. I still need to kill about 850 more Ogres to get my second epic dagger and an epic necklace. I've been plugging away at it 15 or 20 minutes at a time for the last several months.