{"id":993,"date":"2006-09-13T14:18:36","date_gmt":"2006-09-13T14:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/cingular-8125-review-part-2\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T22:04:59","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T03:04:59","slug":"cingular-8125-review-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/cingular-8125-review-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Cingular 8125 Review &#8211; Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in April, I made a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/cingular-8125-review\/\">post about my new <span>Cingular<\/span> 8125<\/a>.  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&#39;ve collected my thoughts on the experience:<\/p>\n<p>The good (or not so bad): <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&quot;Available&quot; list of features still better (more comprehensive) than other PDA options out there <\/li>\n<li><span>Wifi<\/span> makes for a fairly speedy Internet connection<\/li>\n<li>As a cell phone, the call quality is not bad.  The speaker phone is just <span>ok<\/span>, but it does the trick. <\/li>\n<li>Contacts and Calendar sync with Outlook.  While I don&#39;t use Outlook for anything more than a conduit to sync up my contacts and calendar with Yahoo! and <span>GMail<\/span> (albeit, a cumbersome process), it does get the job done.<\/li>\n<li>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 <span>browsing<\/span> the <span>Internet<\/span>). <\/li>\n<li>The screen: The screen resolution is great. Crisp and clear. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The bad (or not so good):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The camera and video recorder: While it has a relatively high camera phone <span>pixel resolution<\/span>, 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 &quot;important&quot; pictures.<\/li>\n<li>Music: For awhile, I tried using the 8125 like my <span>iPod<\/span>.  With a 2GB <span>miniSD<\/span>, I loaded it up with &quot;workout&quot; music and <span>podcasts<\/span>.  The Windows Media interface is not nearly as user friendly as <span>iTunes<\/span> (<span>especially<\/span> for <span>podcasts<\/span> which you still must aggregate outside of Windows Media).  Also, changing songs with one hand and hanging on to the <span>elliptical<\/span> trainer bar with the other is difficult &#8211; the scroll wheel makes it a much easier feat on the <span>iPod<\/span>.  Also, the device does not use <span>standard<\/span> ear buds, so I&#39;ve been using the supplied 2.5mm ear phones that came with it.  The sound quality is fine, but they keep <span>popping<\/span> out of my ears. <\/li>\n<li>The bill: My bills have averaged the $90 \/ month as I had expected for an &quot;unlimited&quot; data package plus phone service, but this is still a chunk of change for the experience.<\/li>\n<li>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 &quot;issues&quot;.  I now have given up on syncing with the second computer and things seem to be better. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The ugly:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If I had been looking primarily for a user friendly and ready &quot;on-the-fly&quot; 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.   <\/li>\n<li>Internet browsing: Unless I am at a <span>wifi<\/span> location, I rarely surf the <span>Internet<\/span>.  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 (<span>Bloglines<\/span> is great as a mobile optimized <span>RSS<\/span> Reader, by the way), but maybe that will improve with the .<span>mobi<\/span> roll out?<\/li>\n<li>Push e-mail:  Doesn&#39;t even compare to my old <span>Crackberry<\/span>.  I gave up on the Push e-mail set up and log into my Yahoo! or <span>GMail<\/span> every time.<\/li>\n<li>Third Party Software:  I&#39;ve had a fairly buggy experience with Third Party Software.  I&#39;ve tried a bunch, but ended up deleting most.  However, I did have fun time playing with <span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/comvu-pocketcaster\/\">Comvu PocketCaster<\/a> that worked really well.<br \/> <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Stuff I thought I would use, but haven&#39;t:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li><span>Bluetooth<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Voice Dialing <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"right\">technorati tags:<a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Cingular%208125\">Cingular 8125<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#39;ve collected my thoughts on the experience: The good (or not so bad):&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[194,191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-mobile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3134,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993\/revisions\/3134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}