Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Cingular 3125 Smartphone Review

Some of the best mobile devices come right from the carriers. Such is the Cingular 3125, billed as the world's smallest, lightest, and thinnest Windows Mobile smartphone. Let's take a look at those claims and see for ourselves.

Well, the 3125 is certainly no chunker. It's a slim 0.6 inches in a world of inch-thick high technology cell phones. Exceptions, of course, are the Motorola RAZR, Motorola Q and Samsung Blackjack. You can probably name some others. Thin is in, as they say. Nobody wants a supersized cell phone. Just take a look at where Apple is headed with its iPhone, if that really is its name. An advantage of the Cingular 3125 is that it is long and lean as well as showing a thin profile. It measures in at 3.9 inches long by 2 inches wide. Weight is a scant 3.5 ounces.

With this form factor, think cell phone not BlackBerry replacement. There's no QWERTY keyboard. You'll need to use the standard dialpad for text messaging. But perhaps BlackBerry thumb is not your ailment anyway. What the 3125 will do is provide you with a suite of Microsoft software including MS Pocket Outlook email with support for viewing MS Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents. MS Windows Media Player 10 plays videos and MP3 files, including streaming music and video.

Photographic support is provided by a 1.3 Megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and multiple picture settings. You can use this camera to take printable snapshots or to capture video at 15 frames per second with a length limited only by available memory. Built-in memory is 64 MB, but it's expandable using the Micro SD / TransFlash compatible card slot.

Two types of Bluetooth wireless communication are on-board. There is support for the usual Bluetooth headsets used for hands-free conversations. But this Bluetooth supports A2DP and AVRC profiles so you can stream music to compatible devices including stereo headphones. The 3125 is a multimedia machine as well as a smartphone.

The Operating system in this mobile device is Microsoft Windows 5.0 Smartphone Edition running on a 200 MHz Texas Instruments processor. Voice network compatibility is quad band GSM for worldwide service. High speed data is provided by EDGE running up to 144 Kbps.

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