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So, I decided to get a new phone. After looking at standard flip phones, I decided to finally consolidate (again) my existing Phone and PDAs). settled on a Cingular 8525, running Windows Mobile 5. I figured I had 30 days to figure out if it was going to work well or not. Right now, I’d say I’m at 85% confidence level.

Here’s what I love about it:

1. Internet Explorer does a great job with relatively complex websites. I tried opentable.com (restaurant reservations), and although I didn’t go all the way to booking something, I got much farher than I got on the Palm.
2. Multitasking OS: I can run many apps at once
3. A good built-in keyboard that triggers landscape mode. It’s pretty comfortable to type on.
4. Convenient buttons for IE and Mesaging and 3 more programmable buttons
5. A Comm Manager app for toggling data connections, Wifi Connections, ActiveSync
6. Flight mode quickly disabling all wireless features at once (I guess in lieu of a Power button)

I’m also glad that there’s are apps for PPC that I used on the Palm (Handyshopper, Plucker, Metro) , and that they use the same DBs as the palm version.

What I don’t like about it:

1. Not a lot of built-in memory for installing apps
2. I couldn’t get the push email feature (XpressMail) working right away. It seems to have been a server issue but i went through a few reinstalls and even an upgrade to the company’s beta (which is nicer anyway).
3. It doesn’t have a standard audio output jack,so I can’t plug in my cassette adapter, in the event that I wanted to use it in the car. i guess I could use a headset instead.
4. Networking on windows mobile is sooooo confusing. Certain apps use my data connection, some use wifi. Some need a proxy (I think just the Media net web site). That’s all fine, but the OS should let you define an order to try them in, and seamlessly cycle through them as needed.
5. It frequently gets in a various states of funkitude, usually cured by a soft reset. Minor annoyance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 5:11 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.