Yes, there's a lot of other cellphone news going on this week, and I invite you to check out other top tech blogs to learn about the new Nokia N73 and N93, the luxurious White Pearl and other hotties. I'm going to stick to the stuff I manhandled in Chicago earlier this week and give you some hands-on opinions of the new Motorola RIZR slider.

It's not RAZR-thin, but it's not thick either. Most importantly, it feels solid, and the slide moves very smoothly rather than with a snap or a scratchy feeling.

The user interface is pretty much exactly like most other Motorola phones released in the past few years, but with the improved phone book, so you get multiple numbers per contact automatically. Browsing through pictures feels slow.

The keys have little tactile bumps, but they're small.

That "navigation wheel" is a four-way rocker, not a scroll wheel.

Motorola must have gotten a great deal on soft-touch plastic, because this feels just like the PEBL.

The screen is bright, but not all that high-res.

When you go into camera mode with the two-megapixel camera , the screen rotates so you hold the phone like a camera, and it has left-handed and right-handed options. But the menus *don't* rotate -- so if you go into the menu to, say, change the resolution, you have to turn the phone back upright to work the menu. Clumsy!