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Cingular 3125: The Taste Test
Friday afternoon FedEx was nice enough to drop off my brand spanking new Cingular 3125. Since my contract was up with T-Mobile, I decided it was time to jump ship and return home to Cingular where I have had service since I was old enough to get my first cellular phone. I won’t lie; the move was nowhere near painless. For starters, buying a phone from Cingular’s Business Care Center was the most horrific experience I have had throughout my entire cellphone life. Sure I got one heck of a deal on the handset ($119.99 no mail-in-rebate), but to be honest I would have rather shelled out the extra money to get it from the store.
The phone itself is very responsive. After spending months upon months with my old Cingular 2125 which suffered from the well documented “sticky-key-effect”, it is so pleasant to actually use a phone that can keep up with my speedy fingers. This is by far the best Smartphone I have had the privilege of using, but it does have its faults.
The first major fault of this handset is that it does not come with a case of any kind! I was a little shocked to find this out since I was becoming accustomed to getting a new case with all of my HTC carrier branded devices. This wasn’t so bad though since I run a cellphone accessory company now. I just grabbed one of the new vertical pouches that I got in and the phone was a perfect fit. 
After playing around in the Setting menu there was one thing I found that also shocked me. They removed the Wireless Homescreen which came with previous North American HTC devices such as the T-Mobile SDA and Cingular 2125. For the past few months I have been using this as my main homescreen so I am really disappointed that it is gone. I enjoyed being able to turn Bluetooth on and off without having to hit a million keys to do so.
The File Manager got a tiny face lift as well. The bad news is, I can now no longer delete the unwanted icons from my start menu such as Cingular Mall and everything else Cingular. I tried to do the deleting via Windows Vista RC1 only to find out that I can no longer access the Windows directory of my Smartphone. I’m unsure whether to blame my phone or my laptop, so needless to say, I did not take a hammer to either of them.
I also find myself hitting the camera button often when holding my phone in the closed position. I’m not sure if this is because I have clumsy fingers or the phone suffers from a clumsy design, but it happens a lot. I often hear myself taking a picture of the inside of my pocket or case and while it is amusing, I would prefer if it didn’t do it. 
Speaking of taking pictures, somewhere down the line the developers decided to take away my favorite feature from the built in camera application. You can no longer save your images in folders based off the date like you could on the T-Mobile SDA and Cingular 2125 (with ROM update). We go back to the painfully tedious method of saving all your images to one folder. If you take a lot of pictures and plan on using a program like ShoZu then prepare to face the wrath of thumbnail loading hell!
However, the battery hump isn’t that bad at all. You really don’t notice it and it actually makes the phone feel a little more comfortable in your hands. Not to mention, you get some SWEET battery life out of this new battery. I started playing with my phone on Friday and still have not performed the first charge on my phone and it is now Monday night! Now that is power!
I don’t want to get too much into the handset because we will be reviewing it here on Smartphone Thoughts soon. I just wanted to give you guys my initial impressions and talk about my annoyances, which I do for ever new device I play with. Jerry picked up one of these bad boys as well so keep an eye on this thread because sometime this week Jerry might be posting his thoughts on it!
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| Last 2 articles by the same author |
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Monday, August 7, 2006
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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
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