mos6507's Blog - Cingular 8125

RSS Bot · June 2, 2006

My phone broke over the holiday weekend (a wave crashed over it at the beach, salt water and phones don't mix well). I decided when I got another phone it was going to have to have a keyboard and the ability to termserv to my workstation. I was expecting to get a Treo 700p but the Cingular rep showed me the 8125:

I think it's really encouraging where phone technology is headed. The PDA is definitely merging with the phone and I couldn't be more pleased. The fact I was able to get this new phone for $300 after contract renewal and rebate is quite remarkable.

I remember one time wishing I had a Sharp Zaurus. This device has about the same horsepower on paper as the original Zaurus, but a lot more features built-in like wifi and Bluetooth 2.0 and the wider slide-out keyboard. And of course, it's a PHONE too. Convergence finally starting to happen here. Just one holster, one device to keep charged. Maybe I can stop using my iPod too if I buy a 2GB miniSD card.

The hardware I like, although these days I think the OMAP processor is too slow. There is an overclocker called OMAPCLOCK I have installed which seems to speed it up some but it looks like it only barely plays 320x200 video content at fullspeed and only with the right codec. Opera puts lots of demands on the CPU when reformatting HTML. I haven't tried Skype yet but people claim it will work when overclocking. I haven't run any battery life benchmarks to know if the OMAP really pays dividends there vs. XScale. The powersaving settings seem to do wonders but it's annoying having to turn it back on from standby constantly.

I'm not that thrilled with Windows Mobile 5. When I think about what you could do with this kind of hardware, it seems largely wasted on WM5 from a UI perspective and from a performance perspective.

The most frustrating part for me is the Wifi configuration. It's totally confusing. Networking is branched into two groups and it's never clear whether an app is going to try to network through one or the other. I understand the idea, that you'd have "The Internet" and your local private network but the execution leaves much to be desired. So far I've been unable to get encryption working with Wifi connections.

I hope to be able to connect to my home workstation through EDGE or Wifi. That's the next leap. But for now I've got Opera running and I'm syncing contacts and tasks through Outlook which is nice. I have been unable to get a working yahoo messenger client. Agile Messenger isn't working with it. I use Yahoo with my work contacts.

I hooked up an SMS notification system through the email gateway for cingular so when the site I'm working on goes down, I'll know no matter where I am. That's a great thing, although it would have worked with my old phone too.

It appears as though this phone and its siblings from the other carriers are becoming popular, and I hope this means we'll see some increased software development for it. It's hard to find software because most of it only runs on ARM/XScale.

I don't know what kind of alternate OS you could run on a smartphone and still be able to use the phone features but I would think Linux (like Opie) would run a lot smoother on this hardware than WM5 does currently.

In the meantime, I still like having the all-time net capability without having to spring for a laptop yet. I was almost there with my (now broken) Nokia candybar phone with Opera Lite but the ultra-low resolution screen and keypad entry were just painful limitations.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...&showentry=1605