Cingular 8125

As I posted before about upgrading my phone, here I want to review about my new smartphone, Cingular 8125.

For Cingular 8125, I found out that it is based on OEM from HTC. Some specifications I can tell about this phone is below:

• Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone Edition
• 128MB SDRAM / 64MB ROM
• TI OMAP 195 MHz Processor (don't know why it is 195, not 200 MHz)
• Integrated, sliding QWERTY keyboard
• 2.8" QVGA 320x240 64K Color LCD Touch Screen
• Integrated Bluetooth Class II
• Integrated Infrared
• Integrated 802.11b/g support (by default it is b, needs a hack to make it work for G)
• Integrated Mini-SD slot for greater storage and expansion
• 1.3 MPixels camera
• Comes standard with Mobile Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Comes with Microsoft Media Player (it is able to play MP3, WMA, etc.)
• The handwriting recognition is quite good

Included Accessories

• Lithium ion battery
• Compact wall charger
• Stereo earbud headset
• USB data cable
• Leather pouch

I also download another media player (pocketmusic from www.pocketmind.com). It is able to play unlocked AAC (format used by iPod/iTunes) as well others (MP3, OGG, etc.)

The thing I don't like from the phone is that the processor is too slow, especially if you are running some other applications in the background. I have to kill other applications frequently to make it more responsive. Besides, I cannot put Skype on this one, as Skype requires minimum cpu clock to be 300 MHz. But for the rest, the phone is really cool!

Browsing the internet is really good, because it is MSIE (compatible to most sites on the internet). Synchronization with my PC is (almost) seamless. I hook up the USB cable, and voila, the background ActiveSync on my PC recognizes it and start synchronizing with it. It sync with Exchange server at work as well. So, all schedules, emails, notes and tasks are sync. We can also configure the period of sync, e.g, immediately, every 15 minutes and so on. We can also configure the email sync as well (e.g, today's emails etc.)

If we search on Google, there will be a lot of information about this cool phone. I have been lucky to get this phone relatively cheap (I paid only $225+tax, no S/H and activation fee was waived. The list price is actually $449 if bough without service plan).

Now, I am curious how to develop a program for this little-but-good gadget. I have downloaded MS Visual C++ for Embedded System (trial version?) as well as its SDK from MSDN. I am really eager to develop a small software for this one. Perhaps even make some money... :-)