rocco augusto

Fight Night 2006: Cingular 2125 vs. T-Mobile SDA

Posted: May 20, 08:58 PM

What we have here are two very solid devices. I just happen to be lucky enough to have had both of these devices fall directly in my lap, so I decided to do what I usually do in a situation like this: pick apart these phones, feature by feature. These phones have been out long enough now that if you don’t know the specs on them then I’m convinced you have been living under a rock for the last several months. Just in case though, I’ll go over them all again because I’m such a nice guy.

First up we have Cingular’s current Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone known to the world as the Cingular 2125/HTC Faraday. Overseas this is also known as the Orange C600 which comes without the hump and in a limited edition ceramic white color, which is very rare from what I have heard, instead of the nice gray that Cingular has.

The Cingular 2125 sports the following:

• Windows Mobile 5 (SP Edition)
• 200 MHz Processor
• 64MB RAM/ROM
• Expandable miniSD Slot
• Bluetooth Connectivity
• QVGA Display (240×320)
• 1.3MP Camera
• Video Recorder (3GP, MP4, Motion JPEG)
• Quad Band GSM Technology
• GPRS/EDGE Data Technology
• 1150 mAh Lilon Battery
• Pocket Internet Explorer
• Pocket Outlook
• Pocket MSN
• Windows Media Player 10 (SP)
• Basic Image Editing Features

This is Cingular’s first Windows Mobile Smartphone to include EDGE technology, and if you want my honest opinion, I have no idea what took HTC so long to get on the 2.5G bandwagon. It’s amusing because now everyone is sitting around waiting for a UMTS/HSDPA phone to hit the market and hopefully HTC won’t keep us waiting as long as the did with EDGE.

As a phone, the 2125 performs beautifully. I was honestly a little concerned when I first bought this phone, for a number of reasons. For starters, this phone sports the very controversial hump which has spawned the very affectionate term, Hump-phone. This hump is only available on the North American version of the Faraday handset, for the purpose of improving reception since we are not as evolved in our mobile technology as our good friends on the other side of the pond. Also equipped on this device is the most beautiful screen I have ever seen on a phone. The first time I turned the device on I almost dropped it in shock as my heart, and eyes, were not prepared for such glorious clarity. One drawback is that if there is one thing Cingular did not skimp on, it would be all the Cingular branding on the phone.

Now, let us get on to the good stuff. The buttons are a little crammed together. My previous phone was an Audiovox SMT5600 and I was really digging the key layout on that phone. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the rocker and I much prefer the easy-to-use joystick that comes on the 2125, but I would have liked a little bit more room for the buttons. I do an awful lot of typing/texting and I often find myself accidentally hitting several buttons at once if I’m not paying attention, something I rarely did with the 5600. Speaking of texting, there is one feature on this phone that annoys me to no end. If I am typing a new word that the devices T9 function does not know and I utilize the “Add Word?“ function I have to go through and manually enter the word again. The 2125 does not automatically take the partially written word I was working with and let me edit it. It might not seem like a big deal but it is honestly the biggest gripe I have about this device.

Call quality is really excellent on this phone. I think there are only a few places in my city where I have dropped below three bars. The hump actually seems to work fairly well. I can tell you that I have about twice as many bars now compared to when I had the 5600, which was still a very excellent device in its own right reception wise.

The camera still suffers the same problem as do all other HTC Smartphone�s cameras; it just isn’t that great. For what it is, its fantastic, but I have seen comparison photos from other smartphone’s (such as the Treo 700w) that blow this device’s camera out of the water. The good news is that Microsoft has created a nice little app that lets the user do some basic image editing from within Windows Mobile 5.0 and this seems to fix some of the annoyances I have with the cameras quality. Unfortunately I do have other things to nit pick about. For starters, if you use your camera a lot, such as I do, you will find that if you do not delete or remove pictures from your phone you will suffer from some pretty severe lag.

The included software with the Cingular 2125 bugs me too. For starters, they included Outlook 2002. I mean, seriously. I understand that this is most likely Microsoft’s fault and not HTC’s, but couldn’t we at least get something that was a little bit nicer to look at? It’s literally the difference between looking at Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It just feels old and dated. It annoys me. Personally I use 4smartphone.net for all my syncing needs but if I did use my own personal computer I would not want to use such an outdated piece of software.

On the plus side, Windows Media Player 10 works like a champ for music. Still has problems with playlists but it does everything else good. Just load your music on to your expandable miniSD card, update your library, and listen. It’s that simple. I’m just disappointed that you can not update the codec�s of WMP 10 to play Divx/Xvid movies, but that is what we have The Core Pocket Media Player for.

Voice Notes are handy when you’re in a tight situation where you’re too lazy to pay attention to whoever is speaking to you. Just load it up and go. I find myself using this often in meetings when I just want to space out and day dream about not being at work. Very handy. I suggest playing with it from time to time.

The Cingular 2125 does come with Pocket MSN, which lets you sync up your Hotmail email account and use services like MSN Messenger. Unfortunately there are no instant messaging programs preinstalled on this device for services such as AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk or Jabber.

The last important feature I’ll go over on the 2125 is the almighty Comm Manager. You can access it easily by tapping the top-most button on the left side of the handset. One thing I hated about all of my other Windows Mobile 2003SE devices was jumping around like a circus monkey through the menus to activate and deactivate the Bluetooth controls. Here it is just two easy, and simple, clicks to turn the phone’s Bluetooth capabilities on and off. This is probably the single greatest innovation in the current lineup of Windows Mobile Smartphones.

Now let us move on to the second phone in this review, the T-Mobile SDA (US version). This phone is a variant of the much acclaimed HTC Tornado, also known as the i-Mate SP5m. The “m“ stands for music, which this phone was mostly designed for, with its white-ish silver body and handy, but increasingly annoying, music centric buttons.

The T-Mobile SDA sports the following:

• Windows Mobile 5 (SP Edition)
• 200 MHz Processor
• 64MB RAM/ROM
• Expandable miniSD Slot
• Bluetooth Connectivity
• QVGA Display (240×320)
• 1.3MP Camera
• Video Recorder (3GP, MP4, Motion JPEG)
• Quad Band GSM Technology
• GPRS/EDGE Data Technology
• 802.11b WiFi
• 1150 mAh Lilon Battery
• Pocket Internet Explorer
• Pocket Outlook
• Pocket MSN
• Windows Media Player 10 (SP)
• Basic Image Editing Features

You’ll notice right off the bat that the Cingular 2125 and the T-Mobile SDA sport pretty similar technology. The main difference here being that the SDA is equipped with the holy grail of Smartphone features: WiFi (Wireless Fidelity… for those wondering what the hell it meant). This feature is the saving grace, as well as the most significant downfall, of this Smartphone.

The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the 2125 and the SDA side by side is that the SDA looks a bit bigger. In reality it really isn’t. The 2125 happens to taper on the bottom a bit causing it to look sleek and sexy while the SDA has more of a wider, whiter, iPod-esq thing going for it. In reality they are virtually the same width, minus the tapering bottom, I think it is just the different colors that make the phones look like they are completely different sizes.

Most of the features on the SDA are identical to the 2125 so I won’t beat the proverbial dead horse and make you read through all of it again. I will mostly go through and point out their key differences which make me simultaneously love and hate this phone … like I do all phones.

For starters, as I mentioned before, WiFi is a godsend… unfortunately it is just too damn hard to get up and running for this to be a viable means of data use. I do a fair amount of browsing on my phone, mostly to the Smartphone Thoughts forums, and I have found that generally it is just easier to fire up the old browser and use EDGE for all my browsing needs.

Now there are times when EDGE just won’t cut it. Mostly this applies to streaming video. I do a lot of streaming of live TV, music, videos and even images with a nice free little program out there called Orb created by Orb Networks. Orb completely blows Sling Media’s Slingbox out of the water but that is an article for a different day. Using the SDA’s WiFi I am able to stream high quality live TV from my home theater PC (HTPC) setup straight to my phone. Once again, this is great for slacking off at work when I should really be paying attention or doing something.

Now here is where the WiFi gets annoying. I have found that whenever I come in range of an unsecured wireless access point my phone magically decides it would like to connect to it, which in turns causes the phone to drop its connection, which then can take about two to three minutes for me to finally get my phone to connect back to the dang access point I wanted it to connect to in the first place. I wouldn’t mind if this was an isolated incident… but unfortunately it isn’t. Not going crazy and trying to connect to every available access point it comes in range of happens to be the isolated incident. In other words, this phone is a WiFi hussy, which causes me to never turn the WiFi on.

As another point of annoyance, the buttons on this phone are extremely cramped. The 2125’s buttons feel like a spacious NY style loft apartment compared to the buttons on this phone. The main problem here is the inclusion of the media buttons. While in theory they seemed like a good idea, in reality they prove to be nothing more than space-wasters. Now, I listen to a fair amount of music on my phone and I will admit, they are handy when I’m listening to music, but when I am not listening to music sometimes I would really like to hit the left softkey button without bringing up T-Zones. I don’t think this is too much to ask. A better place to put these magical buttons would have been on the actual stereo headset that was included in the box, which would have made more sense.

Next I would like to talk about two incredible features on the SDA that are the two that I loath on the 2125. The first feature is the phone’s camera application. Whenever you snap a picture, the SDA saves that picture in a folder that it creates based off the date. This is the most incredible feature ever! It is my favorite feature of any Smartphone ever made! Unless you are taking a hundred pictures a day this completely cancels out the lagging problem in the “Pictures & Videos“ application. Obviously someone who takes a lot of pictures ran into the same problem as I did, and that person is my hero.

The second, and less notable feature, happens to deal with T9. If I want my device to utilize the “Add Word?“ function it will do so, and start me off with whatever misspelled word I originally had. This feature saves me a ton of time when texting someone back and forth using made-up words that only I know, such as “foshizzle” and “w00t”.

The T-Mobile SDA also has an extra application on it for instant messaging. While this program is supposed to let you log on to the big three, AIM, Yahoo! and MSN, I have never once gotten the program to work, which is more of a let down than not having it there at all.

Once again, just like the 2125 before it, this device suffers from some serious branding problems as well. On top of that it also suffers from a horrible selection of ring/alert/message tones. I was actually insulted the first times I turned the phone on, made an error and received a phone call. I don’t know if anyone has clued T-Mobile in, but this phone is perfectly capable of playing mp3/wma/wav tones. While it might be hard, I think it would be perfectly alright if they retired the old 80’s Casio keyboard and moved on to something a little more high tech.

Last but not least, the Comm Manager. There are more options here than what we have on the 2125, mainly because of the extra WiFi. Just like the 2125 though, this tiny little application is the saving grace of the phone. Every time I open it up I am amazed at just how helpful it is when compared to older Windows Mobile devices. No matter how many flaws both devices have, I think I will always be satisfied as long as I have a working Comm manager.

This brings us to the conclusion of this competition. And if we add up all the flaws of each phone and all the positive things of each phone as well as the few negative things, the clear winner here is obviously… the consumer. Both of these devices are fantastic. If you’re the playful sporty type you will most likely be happy with the T-Mobile SDA since it is targeted more towards the younger, hipper crowd. If you happen to be more of a business type of person, like me, you’ll probably gravitate more towards the Cingular 2125. Either way you will be the proud owner of some of the most solid HTC phones I have ever had the privilege of using.