I’m temporarily rocking out old-school on a Nokia E70 while mustering up the guts to pull the trigger on a spankin’-new N82. I probably don’t need to remind you guys, but Nokia smartphones are known for being “phone first, smart second” where Windows Mobile devices are known to strut as “suspect-quality PDA with ‘phone.exe’ installed.” I’m pretty fond of the former — in fact, if Nokia would drop some unlocked S60 phones with CDMA2000/EV-DO radios inside them and Sprint finally unlocked their network (you know, like they agreed to do), I’m pretty sure I’d have to stop writing about wireless because there’d be nothing left to complain about.

That’s neither here nor there.

I’m just now falling back into S60’s loving embrace after an extended stint with WinMo Professional (courtesy of HTC Titan/Mogul), and the transition has been really smooth. Yesterday, I fired up a quick game of Snakes on the E70 while waiting for a friend to call. I enjoy Snakes more than the developers might have reasonably hoped one could enjoy Snakes: it’s cheap, addictive, legitimate entertainment. My friend ended up calling while I’m smack in the middle of an intense level — I’m serious, there are mean walls and I’m making sharp turns across hexagonal spaces and I’ve already eaten like fifty of those delicious dots so my guy is on “don’t-crash-into-your-own-butt” notice. That’s not the kind of action you just quit out of!

The game paused itself as the call came in, faded out to the standby screen which showed the incoming call from my friend, allowed me to quickly push “ignore” (no kidding, this level was fierce!), and finally faded back into the still-paused game (without a further keystroke from me) prominently displaying the options menu so I could unpause and finish the level before calling him back.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “big deal, something worked well, things should always work well.” You’re absolutely right, reader — things should always work well! Sadly, that’s just not necessarily the case when it comes to complicated converged devices, third (or first) party software, and getting uncompromised reliability from them. Regular and unquestionably recurring instances of the fine behavior mentioned above are something I have never gotten from my time with Windows Mobile Professional, and I’ve tried it all — stock ROMs, hacked ROMs, you name it (though a big tip of the cap goes out to the fine folks behind the latter) — I want to see a big reliability boost out of that platform. In fact, as that call came in yesterday I felt myself having nightmarish flashbacks to a month ago when I was staring at endless-loop graphical glitches caused by an incoming text message setting off a focus war between S2U2 and PocketCM solvable by nothing short of resetting the device, or incoming calls that arbitrarily elected not to register until I manually woke the device up from sleep, hours after the calls had been missed.

There’s always a fix or a series of fixes for anything that ails the “oh-snap-we’re-phones-now” platform from Redmond, but man it’s nice not to have to think about them.