Back in April, I made a post about my new Cingular 8125. I had owned the phone for a day and had gotten off to a rocky, yet still promising start. I have now had 5 months to play with it, so I've collected my thoughts on the experience:
The good (or not so bad):
- "Available" list of features still better (more comprehensive) than other PDA options out there
- Wifi makes for a fairly speedy Internet connection
- As a cell phone, the call quality is not bad. The speaker phone is just ok, but it does the trick.
- Contacts and Calendar sync with Outlook. While I don't use Outlook for anything more than a conduit to sync up my contacts and calendar with Yahoo! and GMail (albeit, a cumbersome process), it does get the job done.
- Touch screen: While there is a QWERTY key board, I find I use the touchscreen and stylus a lot of the time (especially for dialing the phone and browsing the Internet).
- The screen: The screen resolution is great. Crisp and clear.
The bad (or not so good):
- The camera and video recorder: While it has a relatively high camera phone pixel resolution, the quality is still not up to par with a stand alone digital camera. I find that I rarely use the camera phone and I end up taking my digital camera if I know I will be taking "important" pictures.
- Music: For awhile, I tried using the 8125 like my iPod. With a 2GB miniSD, I loaded it up with "workout" music and podcasts. The Windows Media interface is not nearly as user friendly as iTunes (especially for podcasts which you still must aggregate outside of Windows Media). Also, changing songs with one hand and hanging on to the elliptical trainer bar with the other is difficult – the scroll wheel makes it a much easier feat on the iPod. Also, the device does not use standard ear buds, so I've been using the supplied 2.5mm ear phones that came with it. The sound quality is fine, but they keep popping out of my ears.
- The bill: My bills have averaged the $90 / month as I had expected for an "unlimited" data package plus phone service, but this is still a chunk of change for the experience.
- Active Sync: It does what is it supposed to do most of the time, but when I was syncing to two different computers early on, I ran into all kinds of "issues". I now have given up on syncing with the second computer and things seem to be better.
The ugly:
- If I had been looking primarily for a user friendly and ready "on-the-fly" cell phone, this phone would not be it. Taking calls is no big deal, but making calls is more cumbersome without a traditional number pad.
- Internet browsing: Unless I am at a wifi location, I rarely surf the Internet. It is painfully slow and few standard web sites are optimized for mobile devices. I have tried Opera and Opera mini, but noticed only minimal improvement over IE. There are a few exceptions (Bloglines is great as a mobile optimized RSS Reader, by the way), but maybe that will improve with the .mobi roll out?
- Push e-mail: Doesn't even compare to my old Crackberry. I gave up on the Push e-mail set up and log into my Yahoo! or GMail every time.
- Third Party Software: I've had a fairly buggy experience with Third Party Software. I've tried a bunch, but ended up deleting most. However, I did have fun time playing with Comvu PocketCaster that worked really well.
Stuff I thought I would use, but haven't:
- The phone comes loaded with Windows Mobile 5.0 and a package of Windows Mobile software that allows read / write access to Word and Excel. I thought I would use this a lot, but I have never created or edited a document on the phone. The interface is just not set up for it.
- Bluetooth
- Voice Dialing
technorati tags:Cingular 8125