You might want to look into this phone. Haven’t used it but it looked good in the store.

Motorola MPx220 Smart Phone. It’s from Cingular

“Anyone have a suggestion for a GSM phone that will do a calendar and contacts sync with Microsoft Outlook?”

Unfortunately only T-Mobile currently offers official service for it (although I hear you can get it unlocked and use it with AT&T) but the HP iPaq h6315 is the best of show, today. GSM/GPRS, WiFi and Bluetooth, and supposedly ~200 hours of standby and ~4.5 hours of continuous talk time. It’s got a slow XScale CPU but the trade-off in battery life is worth it if you actually want a usable cellphone.

The Blackberry 7100t is pretty good. It syncs up with Outlook, has java/html browsing instead of cheesy WAP, and a qwerty keyboard, albeit rather annoying

I just got a Blackberry 7100t that I really like. Push email, reasonable sync with outlook and (finally) consolidation of all my email accounts (via pop and a web service). The keyboard is a bit strange, but it really does work well, and much better of a phone than all the previous Blackberry attempts (which I have also owned).

FWIW, I just moved from the Treo 600 to this and I’m very pleased.

give the motorola smartphones a try (MPx200 or MPx220). they run windows CE and have great outlook support and some other decent capabilities. free compilers from MS to roll your own apps, too.

Phil,
When there is voice mail, you could have the vonage system send you an email to your cell phones SMS account.
This works really well and if it is from someone important I can check immediately wherever I am. Including checking over the web and having the voice mail play on your computer, instead of the traditional
interrupted dial tone.

Like you, I got fed up with handspring/treo and have converted to a
Motorola v500( I got this in UK). You can get a v600, they are quad band i.e) pretty much works everywhere you go when you get a SIM card or have international roaming.
Their calendar is not as extensive as a Treo or a communicator line, but does its job. Personally I am sick of a carrying around a bulky communicator which does not work well as a phone. Often times Treo
has been a dead weight with spotty reception. whereas the v500 worked with the same provider and plan in areas where I did not get signal with my tro.

I also had trouble with the 270. The hardware seemed extraordinarily flimsy. When I received it, the top right screw was in too tight, so the screen kept registering input from the case being pressed against it. Great. Then I dropped the thing onto my desk, and the entire lid shattered, like some sort of model airplane. So I shelled out for a Treo 600. Seems like palmOne has done a better job on the hardware, though your experience isn’t exactly comforting.

Some things to add to the Treo 600 review. palmOne still hasn’t fixed the “birthday” problem. This is incredibly annoying, and incredibly confusing. My girlfriend’s Tungsten, running an older (!) version of Palm OS, has a field in the Contacts database for birthdays that hooks up with the Date Book. The 600 does a better job than the 270 with contact search. Well, better precision, generally worse recall. E.g., a search for “ma” doesn’t reutrn “Harvard Book Shop” (located in Cambridge, MA); instead it appears to search only first names, last names and knows about initials. The call log integration is slightly better. The speakerphone generates an annoying echo for the person you’re calling. And there is still no voice dial support.

Treo issues:

I’m really surprised by this. The top brass in the IT company I work for has been issued Treo 600’s and I have only had to send one back due to a hard reset error it had. Other than that I’ve got people grinning from ear to ear, or was, until they heard about the high-res screen on the new units.

I’d also say get away from Outlook. Get yourself a nice mac, a little bluetooth, ical, and you can sync from your pocket w/o issue.

The problems we always ran into with Blackberry is good product, bad software. They bend you over to run their server and its all proprietary. That’s no fun for flexibility and thinking outside the box.

Maybe we need to move your home farther away from the power lines

-a

You should try a Blackberry 7130 from T-Mobile. The QWERTY is great, and the phone works well too.

Go for a Motorola MPX 220. No Qwerty keyboard, but a great phone.