There's been a lot of hype lately about Motorola's Q, the Blackberry 8700c and the Treo 700w. For the Q and 700w, service is only available on Verizon's CDMA network. If you're not travelling outside of the United States – this is the way to go. I've been with every carrier now, the phones may be cooler or more "open" (I'll get to that in a little bit) on the other networks, but it's hard to beat Verizon's coverage.
What it lacks, at least in the case of Santa Barbara, is a highspeed data network. Here we are limited by Verizon's 1x data network, which downloads at a rate of about 15 KB/sec, or about 1/10th the speed of your home cable/DSL package.
This is where Cingular's EDGE network cleans house. Phenomenal download speeds are available with certain phones/PDA's on Cingular's network. This makes a huge difference in web browsing and data download. It does not make a huge difference with push technology. Push happens when you're not looking and is basically designed for low data consumption.
As far as push is concerned, Blackberry still owns the competition. Microsoft's mobile push/ready sync technology has infrequent but annoying errors. This is largely due to the service provider and not a completely error-free mobile operating system. The advantage of Blackberry is that they do all the hosting and talking with other servers. They've taken the hard part out of the job.
Just like the Mac/PC battle, Microsoft's Mobile OS wins out in outright expandabilty and functions. A built-in Microsoft productivity suite (word, excel, powerpoint, etc.), windows mobile media player and large scale memory expandabilty in the form of SD cards win out. You will see more software available for these devices than Blackberry.
