Cingular 8125

I've had my Cingular 8125 for a couple of months now. It's one of those
'love - hate' relationships. For the most part I love it as a PDA,
and I hate it as a phone... Here are some of the issues I have with it;

Phone wise, I came from T-Mobile where I had a Razr V3. I mostly use the
phone in the car while driving on the Interstate. I rarely had a
dropped call. Now, with the 8125, it will drop calls every couple of
miles. It's not unusual for me to have 10 drops in a 30 minute
conversation while driving. That is certainly the most frustrating part
of this phone.

The stereo headset that comes with the 8125 is nice. I wanted something
with a better microphone though. I went with a wired headset because I
was under the impression you get better performance with wired as
opposed to bluetooth. I had read that the sample rate for wired is
twice what it is for bluetooth. It made sense to me. I couldn't find a
wired headset that worked worth anything with this phone. I tried a
couple of Jabra's and a Plantronics M505. They were all horrible at
picking up my voice. Finally, I tried a bluetooth headset and it works
pretty well. I would like to find something with good noise
cancellation that I can use outside though.

I love the fact that this phone syncs with our Exchange Server. It's
great to have access to all my contacts, calender, and email. However,
I have a couple of hundred contacts which makes for a long list when
trying to dial a number. My attempted solution was to create a category
called 'Cell Phone' and assign just the contacts that I call regularly
from my cell phone to that category. Then, on the phone I can filter my
contacts for just that category. Brilliant! Not really. The filter
setting on the phone is not persistent. So, every time I go to use the
contacts list on the phone, it's an extra 9 button presses to get to the
filtered view. Is there a registry hack that will make the filter
setting persistent?

The screen looses it's alignment on a regular basis. That's annoying.
I use 'letter recognizer' as my input method and find that the 8125
thinks I'm about a half inch to the right frequently. Sometimes it
corrects itself after a few minutes. Sometimes I have to go through the
alignment calibration. I don't know if this is a WM5 problem or an
issue with a program I have installed.

There's a couple of web based things I can't get to work right either.
I can access Delta Airline's web page for mobile devices, but the links
don't work. Another is Google Maps. I've loaded the software for the
8125, but it just doesn't work right. I can get a map of Nashville, but
when I try to look at the traffic, it just locks up. Has anyone got
Google Maps to work well with their 8125?

I'm interested to hear if other are experiencing the same issues I have.

Thad

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› See More: Cingular 8125

"Thad Touchton" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...

> Phone wise, I came from T-Mobile where I had a Razr V3. I mostly use the
> phone in the car while driving on the Interstate. I rarely had a dropped
> call. Now, with the 8125, it will drop calls every couple of miles. It's
> not unusual for me to have 10 drops in a 30 minute conversation while
> driving. That is certainly the most frustrating part of this phone.

What is the ROM revision of the GSM Radio? (You'll see this when you soft
reset- a list of ROMs. If it's 1.x download the new ROM from HTC America's
website. (This, unfortunately, will require you reinstall all data and
programs, but it's worth it. A LOT of flakyiness, especially with the phone
was corrected in the upgrade.) If you alread have ROM 2.x I don't know what
to tell you about the phone. It certainly is a weaker unit in terms of RF
reception of any GSM phone I've used (prior to this I used Nokias primarily)
so perhaps you might be in a fringe area where your last phone could barely
hang on and this one can't?

> The stereo headset that comes with the 8125 is nice. I wanted something
> with a better microphone though. I went with a wired headset because I
> was under the impression you get better performance with wired as opposed
> to bluetooth. I had read that the sample rate for wired is twice what it
> is for bluetooth. It made sense to me.

Sort of, but we are dealing with a phone here, not an iPod. 8-bit sampling
(Bluetooth) is fine for telephony.

> I love the fact that this phone syncs with our Exchange Server. It's
> great to have access to all my contacts, calender, and email. However, I
> have a couple of hundred contacts which makes for a long list when trying
> to dial a number. My attempted solution was to create a category called
> 'Cell Phone' and assign just the contacts that I call regularly from my
> cell phone to that category. Then, on the phone I can filter my contacts
> for just that category. Brilliant! Not really. The filter setting on the
> phone is not persistent. So, every time I go to use the contacts list on
> the phone, it's an extra 9 button presses to get to the filtered view. Is
> there a registry hack that will make the filter setting persistent?

Not that I'm aware of. My solution for making this phone usable is
Microsoft Voice Command. It's a $30 or so program but made me go from
hating my MDA (T-Mobile's clone of the 8125) as a phone to liking it. It's
a speaker-independant voice recognition program that allows you to simply
speak commands to the phone- i.e. "Call (Name of Contact) at (home, work,
mobile, etc.)" or "Dial 123-456-7890". The phone speaks back your command
for verification and you confirm with a "correct", or "no." It works 100%
of the time in a quiet environment, and about 75% of the time in a noisy
one. (100% if you yell over the noise, but then you feel really silly
yelling at your phone in public!) I've come to the conclusion that voice
dialing is the only way to deal with this phone when you have a few hundred
contacts in it, or else I'd have to get one of my fingers converted to a
stylus by a plastic surgeon!

> The screen looses it's alignment on a regular basis. That's annoying.

And defective- my first MDA did this after about a month.

> I use 'letter recognizer' as my input method and find that the 8125 thinks
> I'm about a half inch to the right frequently. Sometimes it corrects
> itself after a few minutes. Sometimes I have to go through the alignment
> calibration. I don't know if this is a WM5 problem or an issue with a
> program I have installed.

It's a bad 8125. Mine eventually developed a spot the size of a dime in the
center of the screen that would not accept any input. Any press there would
register above, below, left or right of the spot, making any program that
required a tap there unusable, and all other programs to require a lot of
scrolling to avoid the spot.

Get your 8125 swapped out before the warranty runs out.

> There's a couple of web based things I can't get to work right either. I
> can access Delta Airline's web page for mobile devices, but the links
> don't work.

I just tried it and had the same problem. IE Mobile certainly has problems
with a lot of websites. I also tried mobile.delta.com with Opera's PPC
browser and it works fine.

> Another is Google Maps. I've loaded the software for the 8125, but it
> just doesn't work right. I can get a map of Nashville, but when I try to
> look at the traffic, it just locks up. Has anyone got Google Maps to work
> well with their 8125?

Can't help you there. T-mo chose not to include a Java runtime on their
version, so I can't run Google Maps.

> I'm interested to hear if other are experiencing the same issues I have.

Most of them, anyway! As I've said in other threads about this phone, while
it certainly isn't perfect, for me it's as close as any convergence (phone
and PDA) device has come. My biggest gripe has really been the amount of
tweaking and 3rd party programs I've needed to "complete" my MDA- Voice
Command and Opera are $30+ programs necessary (IMHO) to get the thing to
work decently as a phone and a web browser (which are two functions it
should have right out of the box!)




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SinghaLvr wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:50:23 -0400, Todd Allcock wrote
> (in article <[email protected]>):
>
>> Subject: Re: Cingular 8125
>> From: "Todd Allcock" <[email protected]>
>> Date: Yesterday 11:50 AM
>> Newsgroups: alt.cellular.cingular
>>
>>
>> "Thad Touchton" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>> news:[email protected]...
>>
>>> Phone wise, I came from T-Mobile where I had a Razr V3. I mostly use the
>>> phone in the car while driving on the Interstate. I rarely had a dropped
>>> call. Now, with the 8125, it will drop calls every couple of miles. It's
>>> not unusual for me to have 10 drops in a 30 minute conversation while
>>> driving. That is certainly the most frustrating part of this phone.
>> What is the ROM revision of the GSM Radio? (You'll see this when you soft
>> reset- a list of ROMs. If it's 1.x download the new ROM from HTC America's
>> website. (This, unfortunately, will require you reinstall all data and
>> programs, but it's worth it. A LOT of flakyiness, especially with the phone
>> was corrected in the upgrade.) If you alread have ROM 2.x I don't know what
>> to tell you about the phone. It certainly is a weaker unit in terms of RF
>> reception of any GSM phone I've used (prior to this I used Nokias primarily)
>> so perhaps you might be in a
>
> There is a bug in version 2.x of the ROM that causes dropped calls. For
> whatever reason it's never been fixed by HTC, Cingular or Microsoft or even
> acknowledged.
>
> I have a fix for it (which basically involves a registry edit). If you post
> your e-mail addr I'll send it to you. (If I can find the original source
> I'll post a link to that.)
>
> I was ready to throw my 8125 into the deepest lake I could find until I found
> this fix. (Now the phone (aka my "leash" only annoys me a little bit.)
>
Please, sent it to me. That is certainly the most annoying part of this
phone. You can reach me by email via my gmail address. Just use my
first name dot last name at the gmail domain.

Thad Touchton

At 20 Oct 2006 11:23:02 -0400 SinghaLvr wrote:

> There is a bug in version 2.x of the ROM that causes dropped calls.
For
> whatever reason it's never been fixed by HTC, Cingular or Microsoft or
even
> acknowledged.

Interesting. That might explain why many folks at xda-developers.com
switched from the Cingular radio ROM to the T-Mobile one (which I use,
since I'm on T-Mobile it came with my MDA ROM upgrade.)

> I have a fix for it (which basically involves a registry edit). If you
post
> your e-mail addr I'll send it to you. (If I can find the original
source
> I'll post a link to that.)
>
> I was ready to throw my 8125 into the deepest lake I could find until I
found
> this fix. (Now the phone (aka my "leash" only annoys me a little bit.)

You might be interested in a new radio ROM floating around at the site I
mentioned above. There's a new 2.47 that supposedly acquires signal much
faster after a loss. My original 1.08 ROM took about 60-90 seconds to
reacquire, 2.25 dropped that to 15-30 seconds or so. 2.47, (which I
haven't tried yet) supposedly knocks the acquisition time down to that of
a real phone! ;-)




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