I have blathered excessively to friends about my disappointment over the lack of availability of the Nokia 6230 through our corporate AT&T representatives, and I am about to do something I do not want to do. I am about to order something other than Nokia.

I have always had a Nokia cell phone (okay, except for my first cell, a Qualcomm brick thing). I have yet to find a phone with the intelligent user interface features of the Nokias. Nokias, like Macs, are a pleasure to use, and work exactly like a cell phone should. Finding names in the phone book and entering message text, potentially the most tedious and frustrating of activities, are simplest on a Nokia.

But I am now asking myself if perhaps a little frustration with the user interface will be a fair exchange for having a phone with the features I want and a tad more technical reliability.

I have to be 100% honest here to say that, beautiful interface and pleasureness to use aside, most of my Nokias have had one or another kind of strange technical glitch. My tiny blue one would freeze and need to be re-set by removing the battery. Two of them have had headphone profile freezing problems, the phones thinking a headphone was attached when there was none there. And my current phone turns itself off if handled or jostled a certain way.

I do not know if any other phone makers have more reliability as far as bugs and glitches go, but I wonder if I should try. The Motorola Razr is looking awfully nice and has the features I want, but it’s a Motorola, and using Motorolas is a pain in the ass. It’s also a clamshell, which I find inconvenient and unnecessary. I’ve poked around my boss’ Sony Ericsson, and it’s cool, but suffers from its own interface ugliness. Is it worth suffering through the poor UI features of these phones to get something more reliable and full of the technical features I desire?

I could of course merge my Palm with my phone and, finally, have all my info and my phone in one device. But the Treo 650, while immensely cool, is relatively huge. I want the tiniest phone possible, since I carry my phone in my pocket at all times. The Treo would not fit very comfortably in my jeans, and it has an external antenna. Snap!

Why can’t I just get the phone I want? Why do I have to go through this nonsense? Or—and this is the most important question—why do I care so much? My life would be easier and I’d be more relaxed if I didn’t give a flying crap what kind of phone I had. That the tiny details of industrial and interface design cause me so much stress is a bane, and I wonder if I should just let it all go.

Long pause.

I of course am dreaming. Details matter to me, and I think they always will. Perhaps what I really need to do is move beyond accepting the fact that I am too picky and through to the admission that not everything will meet my draconian standards of quality. In accepting that most things are made like garbage, perhaps therein I will find relaxation.

So, is it a Razr, a Treo, or wait another 46 months for a 6230? Decision time.