Well, the reason you didn’t hear much out of me last night is that I spent hours — literally — setting up my new smartphone. Here is the capsule version:

• Because I don’t have MS Office, I don’t have MS Outlook. And Windows Mobile devices are set up to synch with Outlook. Luckily, I had found a way to use the freeware program FinchSync to synch with the Mozilla Thunderbird address book and the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. I had to install and set up Sunbird, install and set up FinchSync on both the phone and my computer, and clean out my long-unused Thunderbird address book (I now channel all of my personal e-mail accounts through GMail and work with them online) so that I could import up-to-date addresses from Palm Desktop.
• I got FinchSync running, but I had some other minor problem with the phone and went to the AT&T web site to try to find the answer. The very first thing I should have checked after bringing the phone home was for a firmware upgrade. There was, in fact, a firmware upgrade, which also included an upgrade of Windows Mobile from version 5 to version 6. So I did that, which was time-consuming and which erased every modification I’d made to the handset up to that point.
• I re-installed FinchSync and the GMail Java applet, both of which had been deleted by the firmware upgrade. When I went to re-sync the phone, I discovered that the new version of Windows Mobile on the phone wanted a new version of ActiveSync on my PC, so I had to find, download and set that up.
• The export of address data from Palm Desktop into Thunderbird went relatively well, but there’s a “display name” category in Thunderbird for which there was no equivalent in Palm — and that’s the category that shows up first when the contacts appear on the phone. So I had to go in and manually create a “display name” for each of my 150 or so contacts. I also had to manually enter my upcoming calendar items into Sunbird (which I really like, BTW).
• There was also the normal stuff like warranty registration and just figuring out how to use the thing. It took me a good 15-20 minutes just to try to figure out how to change the ringer volume.

It sounds like a lot of trouble, and it was, but it was also sort of fun — and I think I’m going to be very happy with the Blackjack.