New Phone - Cingular 8125 aka HTC Wizard

The time has come to retire my faithful Audiovox SMT-5600, it has served me dutifully for the last several years but since I am now a Cingular customer, the quality of service on Cingular's network compared to AT&T Wireless' network left much to be desired. I reviewed my options, including the concept of becoming a Verizon customer and getting a Treo 700w, and finally settled on staying with Cingular and taking the Cingular 8125 aka HTC Wizard.

So far I'm loving the increased usability that comes with the full QWERTY keyboard and Pocket PC Phone Edition OS. I will say that, like all Pocket PC Phone Edition devices, this is a Pocket PC first, Phone second. The dialing interface leaves alot to be desired but the flexibility of programs and data-entry makes up for that to me.

Of course the first thing I did was installed the Compact Framework 2.0 so I could port over several wonderful helper programs I've written like TKRoller (simple dice roller, now empowered by a touch screen). Also I've upgraded the Tablet to run Office 2007 Beta 2 (more on that later) so it was also nice to be able to install OneNote Mobile 2007. I've also downloaded several wonderful programs for it including Informant 2005, Audible Player, Audible Air, and Atomica .

I've gotten Bluetooth Sync to work with the tablet (I never did get this working with the 5600) and it can be easily used as a USB Modem for the tablet for those times when a network connection with un-filtered access is hard to come by.