Cingular 8125 Initial Review

I couldn't stand to wait and bought a 8125 on the 24th of Feburary. I've had the device for a couple days and it's very impressive. It's in a completely different class than my Audiovox 5600 Smartphone. According to benchmarks it's a pretty slow pocketPC but it's a lot snappier than the 5600 so I don't notice at all. I have yet to play a xvid movie on it encoded in its native resolution but the screen is phenomenal, very clear and much much bigger.

Edge data speed is great, much faster than regular GPRS. Using a stylus is taking some getting used to but you can do most things with the keyboard if you want. The speakers are louder and sound a lot better. The camera is pretty much standard though I love how it gives you a full screen viewfinder making it feel like a real camera. The keyboard is easy to type on and I love the backlighting.

I like how the miniSD slot is on the top but I'n not actually sure it matters, I install all my programs to the card so I can't really remove it unless I copy everything over to the other cards. Quite possible really but I havn't gotten around to it yet.

Because it's a pocketPC device it has opened up a new world of applications. A lot of the cool programs I couldn't run on my smartphone will work with the 8125. Battery life has been good so far, we'll see how that goes.

My biggest dissapointment so far has been that it's not a regular audio jack on the bottom, it's a regular headset jack so I can't plug headphones directly into it. They really should ditch the headset jack, if you have this phone you should be using a bluetooth headset anyways.

In all it's a much more capable device but because it has the keyboard people are actually less impressed by it than my phone. When I would tell people all the stuff I could do with my tiny phone they would be floored, now they pretty much expect it because it looks like a tiny laptop to them which it pretty much is.

Update March 14

I've had the device for a couple of weeks now and I am still very impressed with the 8125. I used the Cingular ROM and while it worked okay it doesn't have A2DP capabilities. Since I installed a Scosche A2DP adapter in my car, I was jonesing for a little A2DP action in my 8125. There is a Qtek test ROM over at the xda-developers.com FTP site that has push email and the A2DP bluetooth stack so I flashed that ROM to it and it's been working really slick. I no longer have to bother with a cable to listen to MP3's from my phone through my car stereo. Try doing that with an iPod! (iTrips don't count, they are an extra dongle and only get FM quality, A2DP is near CD quality) I haven't had a chance to try the push email yet but they are switching to exchange where I work so I should be able to use it eventually.