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For those of you who might be wondering, no, the honeymoon is not over between the N95 and me. Far from it. It’s more like we just discovered the Kama Sutra.

Yesterday, after a good week of talking crack with some turbine engineers, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get myself back out of Myrtle Beach and on the way home. So I fired up the Google Maps application I downloaded to my phone the day before, asked for a route home, and watched as the little blinking dot that was me joined the route and moved along the blue line home. GPS and Google also helped me find some dinner on Wednesday night.

But once Myrtle Beach started fading behind me, so did the radio station I was listening to. Good thing I had downloaded a couple other applications direct from Nokia: Podcasting and Internet Radio.

Podcasts on your phone? No big deal. We already have pocket-sized devices for listening to such things, and merging the two functions of media and communications is a good step forward but nothing revolutionary.

Mobile broadband, on the other hand, is like year-round Mallomars. When every last NPR station in earshot finished its news programming, and the only music available was the backwoods country and Christian fare, I plugged the phone into the stereo and started surfing. I don’t know how many scores or hundreds of stations I had available to me, but I settled in with some oldies and jazz somewhere between Augusta and Atlanta.

Granted, the oldies station was a good choice at the time because its low-fi music only required 32 or 48 kbps of bandwidth, and I was only covered by AT&T’s EDGE network out in the sticks. EDGE download bandwidth is typically in the barely tolerable 128kbps neighborhood — a number that is likely much higher than it was a year ago, before launch of the iPhone and some reported “network tuning.” But in the 3G network coverage of the city, I can easily enjoy FM- to CD-quality stereo music on the fat 1Mbps-class series of tubes. In the car, in my pocket, music from all over the world.

Sure, you can get an XM or Sirius satellite radio device that detaches from your car or is primarily portable and plugs in to the stereo just like my phone does. But why would I want to be limited to a selection of big radio stations selected by one company, when the low entry barrier of the internet brings at least an order of magnitude more?

And can XM tell you where to find dinner? (Okay, so there are some GPS-devices out there that have XM capability, but boy are they ugly.) Does XM make phone calls?

At this point, the bridge between niche-market devices like the N95 and total dominance of the non-FM radio market is merely a question of network capacity, I think. As the 3G network continues to grow — and Verizon starts opening up its EVDO network to more devices with greater user flexibility — XM radio devices are starting to look like analog television sets to me. Why buy one now?

Of course, lord only knows how long it’ll take to have a US 3G network worth singing about on internet radio. Just to let you know how much my phone misses its native Europe: when I scroll through my Contacts to select someone to call, my right soft-key offers me a very alien option: Video Call.

I don’t even know what to do with that, but somewhere out there some guy named Bjørn Hänssen does.