In which I get the first of many packages.

When I got to work this morning my new phone, an LG Lotus LX600, was on my desk.

I unpacked it, which required opening about six plastic bags and removing five plastic clingies from various of the phone’s shiny surfaces, and plugged it in. Then I checked the quick start manual, and unplugged it from AC power and plugged it straight into one of my PC’s USB 2.0 ports.

I went to sprint.com to activate the phone, but I couldn’t log in…

…so I had to give it to my brother (who is the primary name on our shared cell phone account) to activate it. It was gone FOREVER. I nearly DIED. But then he brought it back and it was finally a properly activated phone!

I love the form factor. It’s square and somehow manages to be chunky and sleek at the same time. It weighs less than my old pink Katana.

It tells me – verbally, not in the form of a dialog notification – when I get text messages. “Message received,” it says. How cute is that?

I love the qwerty keyboard. (It’s a text freak’s dream device.) It’s also an MP3 player (not that I need yet another one of those) and its on board speakers are the best I’ve ever heard from any phone or iPod.

It can be mounted as an external hard drive by clicking the Home icon > Tools > USB Mode (4) > Select Transfer Music or Mass Storage or Phone as Modem or PictBridge. You can move images to and from the device, and put MP3s on it as well.

It has a built-in Google app, Sprint Navigation (a GPS map app), a browser (Opera Mini can be installed instead), and a nicely configurable interface. There’s a built-in doc viewer but I haven’t tested it yet. It takes video.

I will spend my evening transferring my contacts manually, because I’m both too cheap to buy the backup feature and too lazy to take both phones over to Sprint to have them moved.

Long story short: I love the new phone! Can’t wait ’til Notebook Wednesday. This week is totally gonna rock.