First time WinMo - How can you do this faster?

[FuManChuu]

Alright... I'm going to put this out there up front. I so far hate this phone. As a bit of background, I've been a treo user for years. 650->700->755 (and i've fiddled with the 800 a bit). Palm OS is old, ugly, and desperately needs an upgrade... but man, its fast.

To send a text message, i hit the "message" hardkey, and "new" on the screen, immediately start typing a contact name, and be in the text in about 3 seconds in total.

Here (again, best I can tell, please let me know if there is a faster way to do things)... I slide the phone open, either hit the txt button, or hit "messages" on the front of the screen. Hit the right onscreen button "menu", hit new, start typing the name, then go down and msg. All told, its easily about 15 seconds... Is there any easier way? I mean, if I could get the "reply" button at the bottom of the message screen to just be "new", that would save me a step, but is there a faster way?

In a similar vein, contact searching in Palm OS was the same way. I hit the home screen, and type a couple letters on the contact name, and hit the center key, and boom, its dialing. Here, (assuming I want to use the hardkeys, which I do... not a fan of onscreen jazz). Slide the board open, start typing (lags quite a bit here, probably cause I have sizeable contacts), then i guess hit the screen where the name is displayed. Is there a physical button i can press when have narrowed it down to 1 contact?

How about alerts? Palm had a nice "alerts" screen that you could check fairly easily, and was defaulted when coming out of keyguard (which, speaking of keyguard, i love how this phone doesnt really have one).... How in lords name do i clear out all alerts? Do i really have to open outlook, and physically open every e-mail to make the yellow number in TF3D go away? Same thing with text messages...

And how about the fonts? It seems like every other text I open is a different font size... and that drives me nuts. Is there some touchscreen way that I'm changing the font size.... Can I somehow disable that?

Overall, TF3D is beautiful, and it is arguably pretty quick... But I'd trade in speed and ease of use over looks any day... and I'm starting to think this phone isn't for me :/

I'd appreciate any feedback anyones got, thanks