Early Adapter Blues

Well it's happened again..after spending over $400.00 ( of the company's money) on a Treo 700p smartphone a few months ago, Palm has just launched their newest smartphone, the Centro, yesterday. It will be available on Sprint for the next 3 months and appears to cost $100.00 and comes with a $100.00 rebate with a two year subscription. So the phone is, essentially, free. I think It does all that my Treo does; links my calendar and contacts with online sync services, does email, and runs all the Palm apps I have become unable to live my life without ( I know this sounds stupid but I have a program on my phone called ChordLab that will play any chord in any key and write out and play any inversion I can throw at it. It gives me diagrams of the inversions in my choice of treble or bass clef notation, a little keyboard, a guitar fretboard or if I really feel low-rent, tabulature... I also carry two complete dictionaries and 1 thesaurus...on my phone!! Allah be praised!!!) It seems the only difference between the Treo and the Centro is in price- early adapters blues again.
This has happened before. I have in the desk drawer to my left, 2 dead ipods. One is an original iPod bought about two weeks after they were released ( 4 -5 years ago??). The other is a dead iPod Video that I purchased about two days after it was released. I was subject to all the early iPod battery problems with the original and did a little better with the video model but as soon as I got my stuff, I watched the prices drop like a brick in the ocean. The iPod I currently use ( because all the previous models have seriously trashed hardware that Apple wants $150.00 to fix..) is a new model, the "Classic" (I guess it now takes but 4 years for something to become a classic...does that mean that my 1997 pathfinder is a classic-geez it must be a superclassic...). The "Classic" plays great, has a ton of storage ( 80 Gigs!!) and costs about 60% less than my first iPod .The price of the "Classic" is dangerously close to half of what the 30 gig video unit cost. I suppose the good news is that I have the money for such things.

At least, I didn't get burned by the iPhone price reduction, however truth be told, I almost did. I bought my Treo the week that iPhone was released. I went with the Treo because AT&T doesn't have service at my home. I "sacrificed" the iPhone for the Treo. But the hardware gods have shown me no mercy

I don't even want to talk about what my first computer cost...