The Nexus S is just plain old garbage, not to mention any of Samsung's devices. As much as I appreciate Google and what they do as far as technology is concerned (although I wish they had carried out with their initial plans with Android instead of falling to external corporate lure), Samsung just hasn't truly been able to keep up or make products really worth the money. Even though today it's "free", it's still not worth it

I've tried their products (galaxy, galaxy tab, nexus s), and they are sad, sad attempts to mock Apple's product line. Online browsing is horrible, the apps are still subpar, not to mention having apps crash on me more often than I can remember Windows throwing BSODs.

Don't fall for the trap, save your 2 year contract for a phone thats worth it, not garbage

Been gone for awhile, and figure it was time for an update In my trip to Dubai, UAE (pix); I purchased the Nokia 6120 (something I cannot find here in the states), and am loving it!

The pros (and there are alot):

• super small (pocket friendly)
• 3.5G quadband
• very nice QVGA screen
• dual cameras
• a real loud loudspeaker
• latest symbian available
• usable and coherent mp3 player (unlike LG's)
• super fast browser (based on apple/safari's webkit)
• j2me love (i've got a ton of apps already installed and all work flawlessly) - gmail - yahoo go - google maps - opera mini - shozu
• all the great things about nokia that i've always loved (gui design, profiles, contact lists, groups)
• new blackberry/winmobile like front menu (list of favorite apps to show)
• mac connectivity (got my stuff sync'd and working no problem)

Cons:

• haven't figured out the application limitations on the phone yet, but it seems like i can't run more than 3 or 4 j2me apps at the same time (especially if all of them are trying to use the network)
• camera is great during the day...sucks at night and flash seems to make everything blue
• no good FREE all inclusive (aim, msn, yahoo, jabber) client. so far i've tried out trutap (no jabber) gizmo (no jabber) fring (ugly and missing some features) eqo mobile (nice, but i don't like how every time i send a message it states what application i'm using and telling the other person to download it) palringo (can only get on jabber; aim, yahoo and msn dont seem to work) ebuddy (probably one of the best looking, but missing jabber...although it has gtalk, but i don't use gtalk...and i can only log into one screen name per service at a time) nimbuzz (another good one that i probably use the most, but it randomly shuts down on me with no warning)
• would love sms threading (tired of having to go through txts from 2 or 3 days ago)
• i think thats it...

I'll update with anything else I do find.

So I got this phone a couple months ago. It was a toss up between this and the sidekick 3. The needs i wanted to fullfill were
1) QWERTY keyboard
2) Full Web Browser (not just WAP)
3) Email (IMAP specifically)
4) Camera
5) EDGE speed
6) Instant Messaging
The cingular 8125 seemed to fit the bill, and I was happy with cingular already so I decided to stay (plus a friend who works for cingular was able to hook it up).

I was mostly disappointed, when i setup my new account, with the price of the plans. Cingular offered unlimited data for 39.99 (more than most other places, especially for the sidekick at $20), and then the minute plans at 39.99 for 450 minutes (what happened to 600 minutes??). Would have liked more, but I don’t even use my 450 minutes every month, and i always have a ton of rollover to spare.

So like any person with a new phone, I played with it for a few days to get a good feeling for how it worked. Here are my bits for the different applications and functions of the phone:

1. Camera worked pretty well (for a camera phone) except for in dark rooms. They do have a function for this, but it uses aloooot of memory and actually slows down the phone (it’s even hung on me for 20 minutes until i finally just took the battery out and restarted the phone).
2. Web Browser I was not too thrilled about using internet explorer and decided to go with Opera, but I stuck with IE because Opera wanted some extra cash to have it run. Opera was indeed faster, but i was not ready to spend the money just yet. The internet speed was definitely NOT up to what the EDGE technology claims to specify and i was getting really upset at that. I thought maybe this was just due to my location, and didnt seek a remedy until later which i will mention later on.
3. Taskbar With Windows Mobile 5, the act of closing an application is actually not true, it leaves the application open, but not visible to you. So if you open up several applications (especially on accident) your system (phone) starts to lag because everything is still loaded up. So I went to seek a remedy for this. I found Magic Button which makes somewhat of a taskbar, and lets you physically close the application out of memory. This became very handy, and am glad it was free!
4. QWERTY keyboard is not bad, but i found that i can type faster on the number pad (which this phone doesnt really have) without T9. It works, but i’m not exactly fond of how it works.
5. Instant messaging No instant messaging client came with the phone so i went on to search for one. The free one that i found was Agile messenger which lets you log in to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google (which i have banned, see last post), Jabber/XMPP, and more. I had planned to keep this open all the time, but since the network was sooo flaky, it became more of a pain to have to physically reconnect everytime, and i was not receiving all the messages. so i dropped it and found iMov Messenger. This one was ok, but only let you connect to a Jabber server. this is when i discovered that you can log into a Jabber/XMPP server and add functions to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, but you need to physically do it on the server through another client (on gnome/linux i found one called Gajim). Another thing was to find a Jabber server that would actually let you add these networks to your account which took me about 2-3 days just to find. So alot of work was put into this which i finally completed, but in the end was not happy with the iMov client. Random noises would spring up, it was inconsistent with logins, and i just found it to be annoying after awhile. So i dropped it and said to hell with messaging.
6. ActiveSync I don’t use windows, so to do any kind of Sync was just not possible unless i wanted to spend extra money for a client on the Mac (none were available at all for linux). I declined to do this and just said screw syncing my phone with my computer. Also cingular has some proprietary email client that is supposed to be very good, but only works with windows and activesync. So in my opinion, this is not very good and have declined to use it.
7. Email/Text I set myself up an email account made for me to check on my phone. Thankfully the phone supported IMAP and this is one thing that it does, and does pretty well. I’m not a huge fan of POP/POP3, which this phone also supports, but could be handy one day. Also Text messaging works pretty well, saves my outgoing messages as well as my incoming, which alot of my phones in the past didnt do a very good job of.
8. The case that came with the phone eventually got on my nerves due to its bulkiness and the fact that it sat the phone sideways on your belt instead of longways. So I ended up just putting the phone in my pocket and i’ve found it to be more safe there than in that damn case.
9. EDGE suxx!! well, thats what i thought originally. Turns out that Cingular by default connects to its own DNS servers, which is very poor. This is in fact the reason why, if anybody has used this phone and has complained, the internet is slow. I changed over the DNS servers to OpenDNS (the link sends to you to the instructions of how to change over the DNS servers on any windows mobile 5 palm or phone), and now the connection is solid. Now Agile Messenger works alot better, but i’m having issues with XMPP, or atleast my jabber server is not allowing me to connect to it through my phone, but AIM, Yahoo, and MSN are working nicely.

A coworker purchased a sprint phone and was able to connect his macbook via bluetooth to the internet, and was able to get pings at about 20-80ms, I did the same with mine, and was able to get them at about 100-300ms, which is ‘alright’, but if i ever do need to connect to the internet in a hurry when theres no wifi available, i’m all set.

Some other useful things for the Cingular 8125:

• pRSSreader a free RSS reader for WM5.
• Agile Messenger a free multiplatform Instant Messenger
• StreamCenter a site that is WAP viewable to search and play your favorite Radio Stream
• HowardForums a specific link to some handy tools and customizations for the 8125