You knew you hadn’t heard the last from me on my new smartphone. Nope, today I want to share with you all of the nifty accessories that I’ve picked up (ie purchased) for my phone.

One of the first things I bought was a stylus, since my old phone had one. But I’ve discovered since then that I do pretty well without it. I do use it if I have to type a lot. And it’s nifty cuz it’s purple!

Along with that was a car charger for the phone. It was cheap ($8) and simple – basically a USB charging knob with the appropriate USB cable (microUSB).

In addition to a couple more spare USB cables (since all of my other devices use the miniUSB), I ordered a 32GB microSD card to hold much of my music collection. It’s not quite large enough for the entire collection, but I’ve been reading about people having success with 64GB cards and will likely upgrade to that when the price is right. My music currently takes up 40GB (not including Xmas or any of my audio stories).

I also ordered a charging dock for by my PC. Turns out I probably wouldn’t have needed it, cuz I then discovered a nifty Android friendly speaker dock: the Philips AS351 Fideolio Android Speaker. It uses Bluetooth to accept the signal from the phone. It’s like magic.

So now, my phone is my alarm clock for bed. I plug it in at night. Run the Lightning Bug app for my ambient sounds (I bought the Forest package). And in the morning, it will wake me by playing a random song from my collection. And it’s charged!

Since I’ve taken to using MapMyRide (and MapMyWalk) for tracking my bike rides (and walks), I needed a phone dock for my new bike. My bike shop had one available and we tested to see that the phone fit. It did, so I bought it (and later discovered I could have gotten it for a LOT less. Ah well, I’m glad to support a local business.) Mom and I used it today when we rode 7.61 miles (we found out how to get onto the bike path from her place).

Then today while I was driving home (listening to MP3 CDs skipping), I thought “Surely someone’s come up with an FM receiver thingy that works with Bluetooth!” A bit of searching online and sure enough, those are made. So I’ve ordered this nifty little device for my car.

What’s best about this device is that, if it works, I won’t have to wait around for a 128GB iPod Touch to be developed. I mostly wanted the Touch so that I’d have a Harddrive-less device to play in car. But now that I can use my phone to play music in my car, I can get the 160GB iPod Classic for using in my house. (46GB of music incl. Christmas stuff, and 50GB of audio stories – eeep! That’s a lot of Sylv, though it’s not ALL Sylv (just mostly!))

BTW, back to the bike riding. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to ride Amy’s bike when I was visiting her recently. Because it REALLY helps me to appreciate my new bike. Man, I love riding it. Mom is loving her new bike too. We’re going riding again tomorrow. I just wish the helmet that I ordered for mom was in already!