One of the tragedies for me of this holiday season was the death of my Cingular 8525 Smartphone. I absolutely loved that phone, I had it all, I was a pioneer in exploring the whole Mobi platform where I could view television from my phone wherever I was at. I also had gotten pretty handy with the slide out keyboard that a lot of power users have struggled with, I was just content with my phone. It started locking up on me for no reason about a month ago, I would just hit reset and move on. Then about a week before Christmas it just started freaking out on me pretty bad, the Windows Mobile Operating System refused to work right, it had stopped syncing a while back as well, but in just operating the phone as a standalone it would lock up on me during phone calls and not allow me to hang up and the screen would go to bits sometimes to where it wouldn’t be reliable to use. On my birthday (the 21st) I got up to use it and it just wouldn’t respond, we tried everything, os reloads, hard resetting the phone, etc. and it wasn’t working right.
I went to my local Cingular Corporate Store and they helped me find a suitable replacement for it, a Blackberry, my partners Greg and Steve both use Blackberry’s and have been extremely happy with them so I thought, “what the heck”, I gave it a shot. I brought it home and got pretty attached to it right away but had some issues with it syncing up with my Outlook (remember, I am a power Outlook user from way-back). I kept looking at the price tag on this phone and realizing that I didn’t in my heart feel that I was getting my moneys worth out of it so I carried it back to Cingular and traded it in for a Treo 680 (I have owned Treo’s before and been very happy).
I brought the Treo home and plugged it in and it immediately synced up with Outlook 2007 on Vista and over the holidays I enjoyed getting familiar with my Treo all over again. I have to admit that I am a happy camper, still miss the 8525 a little bit but the Treo is far better for what I need it for and that’s business communications. I was able to shoot out emails and text messages with no problem while out of the office. I still have some customization stuff to do with it so that it’s 100% what I need but should be able to wrap that up this week while all of our clients are still shut down for the holidays and it’s quite around the office.
One thing that I did notice right off the bat was how easy our email solution was to plug into the Treo, and how well it interacted. The Pleth Email Solution is a premium email solution that we offer our clients for a small monthly fee. I was able to setup my phone (not remembering our own settings off the top of my head) in under five minutes and was off and running. Oh, and another really cool thing that Cingular does w/ the treo’s that I didn’t realize was that they automatically configure the outgoing mail server for your email client, all I had to do was configure our incoming server and it was off to the races. Very happy camper here!
Please Drop Your Questions or Comments