When “upgrade time” creeps closer on the calendar I start to take closer notice of the devices around me. This is about the time I begin to truly realize just how many choices we are offered when it comes to smartphones, and how hard it is to choose just one device to take home with me. While I’ve never caved in and opened a second line just so I could get a second device that I wanted just as badly as the one I walked out with, I would be lying if I said I hadn’t given it some consideration before. In the end, there’s almost always that phone that tugs on my heartstrings on my way out that always gets left behind.

When I took my last full upgrade I got the EVO 3D; my choice was between the EVO 3D and the Motorola Photon. Why I chose the 3D over the Photon I will never know - I suppose the hype around the “3D” really got to me, and I was also an avid HTC fan. Since I worked at Sprint at the time I spent a lot of my free time wandering between the two devices. I believe what eventually led me to get the EVO 3D was the movie that came stock on the device actually looked really cool in 3D, and I figured that surely they would release more as the 3D feature gained popularity. Much to my dismay the movie was pretty much the only thing that looked decent in 3D, and the rest of the videos and pictures I took only ever looked as good as those tacky 3D baseball cards you get out of cereal boxes – and that’s on a good day. As we can see now the 3D feature never really picked up. I got to walk past the Photon every day and think about what I’d done.

I don’t think I have ever encountered another time where I think back and regret walking out the door with a device as much as I do with my EVO 3D. I was stepping up from an EVO 4G, which I was a pretty big fan of at the time; I figured an EVO 3D could only be better. Boy was I wrong. While there were some things I liked about the device more than my EVO 4G (I’m pretty sure I could literally clock in hours spent spinning my carousel) there wasn’t much that impressed me – not to mention a whopping 3 megapixel drop in cameras, which was done to make room for the second camera on the back of the 3D to enable the “3D” imaging. I gave up the obvious advantage the Motorola Photon had to offer for the EVO 3D all in the name of fandom.

That being said, there have been times where I’ve been completely satisfied walking out the door with a device. Had the service worked where my apartment was when I had the device, the myTouch 3G Slide would have played out to be a favorite of mine. As many people that hated that phone, I will always stand by my opinion that the 3G slide had the best “snap back” feel of a keyboard I’d ever felt. It was solid and it was fast, and easy to compare to another device with a slide-out keyboard, like the HTC EVO Shift 4G, which felt about as solid as a noodle. There was no snap that came from that device. You had to work for that keyboard to come out, and that was annoying. But not the myTouch 3G Slide! I wish I could give an award to that phone for having such a small yet important feature in a slider phone for me. The solidity of the keyboard and the Android-powered operating system was what suckered me into that one, and I remember being completely satisfied walking out the door with that device. I only wish I had more experiences like it, but it seems most of the time I’m stuck at a crossroad with situation A.

There's always going to be the times where I wish I could just take the entire store home with me, but generally there's only two devices that offer what I want in a device that I'll get stuck between. Readers, do you ever feel conflicted when you walk out of the door with a new device? Do you ever feel like you made the wrong decision on which phone you got after it’s already too late? Let me know what you think in the comments!