I've been contemplating my next cell phone as my plan is coming up in May. Never in my lifetime did I think I would live to see my second cell phone contract expire.

I'm currently using a Treo 650 and have been using it to sync with my Outlook, which is hooked up to an Exchange server. The sync works great, but I've grown increasingly weary with the overbearing footprint of Outlook. I also don't understand how it can be so mind boggle-ing slow when trying to find stuff. I've installed Google desktop search just to search for email because it finds things so much faster.

Anyhow, I've toyed with the idea in the past of strictly using GMail for email and GCal for my calendaring. The problem with doing that is the synchronization of the contacts and calendar from Outlook, which has been a deal breaker for me. With my cell phone contract coming up I've been considering using a lighter weight phone with Internet access and just grabbing contact and calendar information from "the cloud" without having to go through the process of sync.

So this week I've been transferring my email from my Exchange server up to GMail (up to 1.4 GB as of this writing), and have also transferred all my future and recurring calendar events to GCal. Then this morning I'm greeted with this new blog post from Google.

Necessity being the mother of invention and all that. Hopefully they'll figure out a solution to sync'ing contacts in the not-too-distant future. If so, I'll have the option of sticking with a PDA phone when my contract comes up in May.