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May 29, 2006

My Cingular 8125 Adventure

This weekend, I swung by my local Cingular store and picked up the Cingular 8125 smartphone. The 8125 is a well-reviewed phone with a full-size, slide-out keyboard, Bluetooth, WiFi, and the usual phone accessories (e.g., camera). It runs Windows Mobile 5.

The thing is going back to Cingular tomorrow.

I dropped cash on the 8125 for a few reasons. First, it seems like every other person in my life is buying a smartphone. Jeff, for example, has been (and is) a committed Treo user, and even recently upgraded to the new 700w. Brian recently bought himself the Verizon version of the 8125 (and loves it). So I was curious: is there something to this smartphone business?

Second, I was hopeful that a smartphone would make managing my personal life a tad easier. It's no great secret that I spend a lot of time away from my apartment (out the door early, home late, and traveling), and if my non-work e-mail, calendar, contacts, to-do lists and other data are sitting on my PowerBook at home, well, they're not doing me much good. Historically, my "solution" to this personal-data-access-issue has been to try using Web-based services; more recently, I've acquired a cellular data card that I pop into into my PowerBook, and I schelp the whole shootin' works around with me. This works, but is far from ideal - it's an extra 5 or 6 pounds on my person. So if a small-n-light doodad like a phone could run my calendar and handle my e-mail ... well, that'd be excellent.

At a super-high level, here's what I wanted the 8125 to do for me:

• Keep and manage my personal contacts, calendar, and to-do list. This I've just talked about; Windows Mobile does it all.
• Allow me to send and receive personal e-mail and text messages. I text a lot, and I've become pretty adroit at the rapid-fire triple-tap needed to text off a standard cell phone. However, there is absolutely no way I'm going to try managing my e-mail in this fashion. If I'm doing mail, I'm doing it with a full-blown keyboard, thank you. One of the big attractions of the 8125 is the slide-out QWERTY; the screen rotates 90 degrees, and suddenly you're in landscape mode. Slick.
• Allow me to send and receive work e-mail. Microsoft IT does a great job of exposing our Outlook corporate e-mail, calendars, etc. to employees with smartphones. As I travel more, there's an undeniable attraction to being able to check and see if anything's "on fire" after the plane lands, rather than waiting to see what's what after I check in at the hotel.
• Allow me to browse the Web. There's real value in getting quick-hit information when you're out and about. This includes weather and movie showtimes, of course, but also bus schedules and traffic reports. Brian and I were sitting in a McMenamins one night and I was goofing around with his phone when the overwhelming utility of an anywhere-you-need-it Web browser smacked me upside the head. I can't really do this on a standard cell - too small a screen, too crummy a keyboard - but if you've got a smartphone with a good keyboard, well, it's a game-changer.
• Internet access for my laptop. As I said, above, I've been using a Cingular PC Card with my PowerBook to get high-speed Internet access. It works great, but it's still an add-in. Ideally, it would be great if I could just connect to the Internet through my cell phone over Bluetooth, "dialing out" over the cellular data network, using my phone to bridge between GPS and TCP/IP.

I'm pleased to report that, of these items, most are certainly possible - as in, on-paper possible - with the 8125. But the reality of using the silly thing just leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly, this comes down to clunky design, and an utter lack of concern for the overall consumer experience.

Let's start with the basics: the 8125 is a bad phone. Period, full stop, end of story. The phone functions seem to have been tacked on as an afterthought. Consider the basic task of dialing a number. You can try to dial by using the touchscreen (which is error-prone and clumsy), or you can use the stylus on the touchscreen (which now requires you to fetch the stylus and poke at the screen, consuming two hands and your full attention). You can also slide out the keyboard to enter the number, except that - wait for it - the number keys are only accessible with a modifier key, so now you're either double-tapping the modifier to put it in number mode (don't make a mistake; backspace doesn't work in that mode), or holding down the option key while pressing buttons.

To put it mildly, this sucks.

Now I know that smartphones are generally assumed to be operated by people who have them populated with their contacts, which changes the usage - now you're just picking stuff out of a list, instead of entering a 10-digit number each time. However, I find that I use my current Motorola v551 in a sort of mixed-mode - sometimes I'm picking Richard's number out of a list, and sometimes I'm typing it in directly. It just depends. So to have a phone that's only designed for one way of interaction seems very user-unfriendly to me.

Actually, the phone-dialing example is good for understanding the whole Zen of this puppy. Windows Mobile is a chunky, clunky user experience. It's hard to navigate and hard to understand, mixing metaphors at every turn. Let's say that you're working on a task on the phone, and now it's complete. Sometimes, you're presented with a wizard-like screen that has a nice, prominent "finish" button. (This is good thing.) Other times, however, there's zero indication about what you're supposed to do next ... and then you notice a small, lowercase, 'ok' in the upper-right corner. So you tap it, and then the task clears.

This is a total pain. Phones should be engineered for people who are busy and don't have a lot of time to stare at an interface like it's the Mona Lisa, teasing out every nuance in order to understand what the ar-teest intended. I'll say this for my Motorola: when the thing needs you to do something, it's very clear about what that thing is, and what you're supposed to do about it.

I'm pleased to report that the Web browser (Internet Explorer Mobile) works as advertised, and I'm even more pleased that some sites (like weather.com and Google) were smart enough to detect that I was on a mobile phone and route me to a lightweight, WAP-friendly version of their Web pages.

The Internet-access-over-Bluetooth, too, was a success. After much research (thanks to Justin Blanton and Ross Barkman) and jiggering, my Mac was able to connect to the phone, dial out, and get good, sustained transfer speeds of 14K a second. While this is clearly not WiFi speeds (it's more like ISDN, circa 1996), it's good enough to get me my e-mail when the WiFi's not available (or, if you're in an airport, outrageously expensive).

But the interface and usability are poor - mind-bendingly poor - and so the phone goes back. It's just not ready for prime time, in my opinion, and it's certainly not worth the $450 (and $40 a month for a data plan). I know everyone's talking about the "mobile future", and I, for one am eager to see it arrive. This weekend just taught me that the wait's a bit longer than I'd thought it might be.

Phooey.

UPDATE, June 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 29, 2006 8:54 PM. Posted to Geek.

Comments

Posted by: Hanan at May 30, 2006 6:48 AM

Posted by: Mark Sullivan at May 30, 2006 11:00 PM

Posted by: briangaither at June 1, 2006 4:21 PM

Posted by: ravi at June 3, 2006 12:35 PM

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