Chances are you ended up shopping this weekend even if it wasn’t what you wanted to do. You know the drill, one minute you’re all about football or beer and the next minute you’re standing in the local Target shopping for stuff you don’t want, stuff the people you’re going to give it to don’t want but stuff the store still wants to sell you. The upside? You might run across something interesting. For example, as I was stranded between some guy salivating over an iPod (this guy wasn’t moving until someone opened the case) and a clearly disturbed person frantically wondering how he could pass video cables off as a thoughtful present. This happenstance meant I could stare at the salivating iPod guy, watch the mental somersaults of an increasingly persperation soaked consumer or look at the merchandise. On on side of the aisle there were Zunes to look at but the other side had phones. The prepay kind, the dregs of the cellular world.

I thought the LG enV was frickin awesome. Well it looked awesome, understated stuff but you could flip it open and BAM, full keyboard and biggish screen. I tried one a day later and the experience left me feeling like I had cheated on my iPhone. So IPM is wondering what phone you’d have if the software didn’t matter. Before you say “the software is the only thing that matters!” hold on a second. Sure, the software is the only thing that matters. That’s why you own an iPhone. That said the iPhone has exactly one form factor and it might not suit you. In the perfect world you’d be able to choose from a huge swath of phones differentiated only by the form factor. In the real world this was called the eighties and the phones were of the corded type.So which phone wins the form factor?

The G1 is obvioulsy out. Instead of the keyboard sliding down the screen slides up. This means that one thumb is hampered by the bulk of the home button. The Storm is right out, you’ve got np keyboard and a weird assortment of other buttons? That doesn’t beat the iPhone at all. And the iPhone is also out. The iPhone is perfect with the software but the thing is all about the perfectin of hardware and software, just left to the hardware the iPhone is middle of the road.

So if you’re picking strictly from a hardware/looks point of view which phone do you pick?