• WHAT: An easy way to try before you buy
• WHY: It's hard to find time to get to the stores
• COST: Zero

How come I can walk into any car dealership and, within a few minutes, get behind the wheel of a $50,000 car, but can't get to experiment with a $50 cell phone for more than a couple of minutes while it's tethered to a display at a cell phone store?  It's ridiculous and, what's worse, probably stops a lot of people from either upgrading their phones or buying more expensive ones because they simply can't tell how they actually work in real life.  Of course, on top of it all, you've got a commissioned sales person with a monthly quota of activations hovering over you asking if you're ready to buy a phone.  (That part isn't much different, actually, than the car salesman - do they really think that I'm going to make a decision to buy something that expensive that I'll be living with for the next several years within ten minutes at their dealership?)

The ability to see, tinker and play with a new phone is crucial to the decision-making process.  Nonetheless, it's a rarity to be able to do so.  In most retail outlets - or online outlets, an even worse offender - you're pretty much shooting in the dark.  Well, you WERE shooting in the dark.  Now, thanks to a web site that gives you a mock-up of the phone you're thinking of buying that's actually functional (all except making calls from it) you'll have more information to make your decision.  

The site, TryPhone, is straightforward right from its home page.  As soon as you land on it you're presented with a graphic of a featured phone (right now it's the LG Muziq) that you can test by using your mouse to click on the respective buttons.  The site isn't perfect - for example, it doesn't show any image at all in the camera function on the main page (it does in the demo function - see below) and doesn't activate the "soft keys" under the screen so that you can click on them inside some functions - but it does give you a much clearer idea of what will work for you and what won't.  You can take your time, experiment with the various interfaces, switch phones easily and determine which one you like.

There's a very nicely integrated "Demo" feature that steps you through the various functions of a phone that you would use most frequently by telling you which key to press and going through the steps for a multi-step function, such as creating a new entry in your phone's address book.  There's also a smartly presented way to compare various devices - you simply select the ones that you want from the "Phones" page and click a "Compare" button.  Like other sites, you can get all of the statistics about size, weight, battery life, etc., but TryPhone differs by putting the images of the phone side-by side in a size much larger than life-size to make it easy to see all of the various buttons, screen sizes, etc. 

It would be helpful if the site integrated some Ajax programming so that, for example, you could actually spin the cylinders on an iPhone to set a date in the calendar or a time for an alarm.  While it may sound minor something like that, in its elegant simplicity, becomes hypnotic after you've used it a few times.  The method of setting an alarm on an iPhone is so vastly more intuitive than doing so on any other device it's almost enough to convince you to purchase one - it's easy to make the (correct) assumption that if a mundane thing like an alarm works so elegantly and effortlessly that the rest of the product will, too.  

Here's an example of one of their emulators - this one is for the iPhone - that they have on their site and encourage others to imbed into theirs:

There are only a few phones on the site today - although they are some of the more popular ones, which probably makes up for the lack of quantity - but a representative from the company promises that they will be adding a few every week.  They're platform and technology agnostic so you're just as likely to see a phone exclusive to AT&T as you are to see one exclusive to Verizon or T-Mobile; they intend to create new phone avatars based on the popularity of the phone and the number of requests they receive for them.

So if you've got a desire for a new wireless toy I suggest you make TryPhone your next stop.  It'll give you a good starting place to see how it works and how it compares to the other possibilities.