Nothing brightens up a rainy Monday in November like the FedEx lady, huh?  It's cold and dreary here in Berkeley, but the PhoneDog West offices heated up considerably with this morning's package delivery:  BlackBerry Bold, HTC Touch Pro (for Sprint), and Motorola ZN 5 all in one fell swoop!  It's almost too much to handle.

After unboxing the three phones on camera and spending the briefest amount of time with them, I can safely say I'm psyched for all three of 'em but perhaps most curious about the Bold.  Why?  On paper, Bold is everything I've been wanting in an iPhone-replacement.  QWERTY, 3G, WiFi, 3.5mm headphone jack, camera w/flash, and true HTML browser ... it's all there.  And a quick look at the browser impressed me: The PhoneDog home page rendered true (if a bit slowly), which is always a good sign.

Meanwhile, the Touch Pro is nothing to sneeze at.  It's more of a known quantity since I spent quite a bit of time with both the Sprint and unlocked GSM versons of the Touch Diamond, but the addition of a slide-out QWERTY board should address one of my main concerns with the device, though it also adds some bulk.  Touchscreens are fun, but QWERTYs are much more conducive to happy messaging and efficient productivity, so hopefully Touch Pro's combination of thumbboard and TouchFlo 3D-enhanced touchscreen should provide the best of all worlds.

And don't forget about the ZN5, the first 5MP cameraphone to get picked up by a US carrier.  Lots of folks think that 2009 will be the year that American consumers start to consider cameraphones as viable stand-ins for digital cameras.  The ZN5 is out of the gate and leading the charge a few months before '09 even begins, with its Kodak camera technology and Xenon flash.  I'm looking forward to getting a photographer friend of mine to put the ZN5 through its picture-taking paces ... just in time, most likely, for T-Mo's SECOND 5MP cameraphone, the Samsung Behold T919, to hit the streets.

A busy, busy Monday indeed here at PhoneDog West.  Best get back to it ...