After slugging along for several years with a basic cell phone and a circa-1999 Palm Pilot, I finally decided to join the 21st century and get a Smart Phone. I spent a couple of weeks trying every Smart Phone on the market: iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre and Blackberry, as well as several proprietary devices. The iPhone lost points for its lack of true multitasking, no physical keyboard and it’s often creepy fanboyz who have turned Apple into a religion with Steve Jobs as the messiah. Android had a lot of apps, but seemed to me somehow unpolished. I’m convinced Windows Mobile is on its way out. I liked the Palm Pre’s operating system, but not the keyboard and the total lack of apps.

So the winner is ... (as the headline reveals) the BlackBerry. I got the Tour. It’s got a very easy to use keyboard, a top notch display, an operating system I understand and lots of different applications. With its ability to sync to Outlook and Google Calendars, it’s an awful lot like the Palm Pilot and the Palm Desktop application I’ve grown to know and love. In fact, I find that there’s little or no learning curve.

This evening, I took it out on my daily walk, listening to MP3s, while using the GPS function to track my distance and rate. Meanwhile, it continued to download and notify me of emails and other messages. Very cool.

The best part is that everything now is one place: calendar, Boy schedules, Mrs. Golfblogger work schedule, honeydo lists, notes, contacts, emails and more. It’s got Documents to Go, which I had on my Palm Pilot and use in a variety of situations. I downloaded a free ebook reader from Barnes and Noble and now have a couple of emergency books always on hand. And of course, there’s always the RSS reader and web browsing.

Now what I need to do is to find some cool golf apps ... a golf video game for sure, and perhaps a golf GPS application so I can ditch the dedicated GPS unit and just take the Blackberry to the course.

So here’s the theory. If a golf ball flies further because the dimples reduce drag, then the same principle ought to work on vehicles.

SkinzWraps, the company that makes those wrap-around car advertisement skins, now has a wrap that dimples your car. It’s called FastSkinz. The company claims an 18% to 20% improvement on miles per gallon. The initial applications will be for large scale commercial use applications, such as fleet operators, trucking companies and municipalities.

I have to admit I’m a bit skeptical. If this actually worked, why hasn’t the auto industry—or at least race teams—come up with this before.

“The preliminary wind tunnel data that came off our car is impressive. I would love to see what this stuff could do on the track,” noted NASCAR legend Rusty Wallace and owner of Mooresville, NC-based Rusty Wallace Racing (RWI).

“We have worked on this ground breaking product in skunk works secrecy for almost a year and a half. This is American ingenuity and American hard work at it best. From that flash of genius to the issuance of this release, I have personally witnessed every step in the process to bring this innovative product to market, so I am very confident when I say with full conviction that MPG-Plus(TM) is going to change everything,” says Peter C. Salaverry, Chairman & CEO of SkinzWraps, Inc.

The company claims that a wrap will last for five years.

Whether it improves MPG or not, I want one. It would complete my golf obsession.

A diagram of how it works is below:

It’s not about golf, but I found this list of eleven things to do with your digital camera good enough to pass on. Among the tips are a few things I already use my camera for: taking pictures of things before I take them apart for repair—it helps me to get them properly back together and; taking photos of things like paint can labels for archiving and future reference.