So I’ve been using the Cingular 8125 going on nearly a month now and it is still a great device and I’m glad I went ahead and bought it. Now, I’m trying to tweak it to my liking. I’ve been checking out the app’s that are out there and trying to find that fit of having to deal w/ M$’s crap and finding a nice alternative (even if I have to fork over some dough to do it). Here is a list of the things I’ve found so far and issues I’m wanting to resolve:

Quick Note: It should be noted that the 8125 does have a slide-out keyboard, which I like, but I do use my device with it closed and would like to use the device with as little of the pen stylus as possible. So if there is questions why I felt one way or another about a particular app., could have alot to do with it.

Email

Email is obviously a must if you are getting a smartphone. Why would you get a smartphone if not at least for the email feature? Anyways, I knew going into it that I would have to deal with Outlook Mobile and hoped it would work, at least some of the time. Well, it’s worked only some of the time, some of the time. (follow that?) Our company has just switched everybody off of Exchange and onto Google Mail’s hosted service for small business. Which I totally dig, because we get to receive our email using the Gmail interface, if we desire, as well as get to share calendars through GCal, etc. Bottom line: Rock!

So what I did was enable POP access on both my personal and work address, via GMail, and then configured my mobile for them to receive. Initially, everything worked like a champ. Emails would come in, I could reply, no sweat. Now I’m getting notified that messages are in but when I go to my smartphone’s inbox they have mysteriously vanished. This has happened in both accounts. WTF? So I’m looking around for alternative email clients. Any suggestions, please post a comment.

Browser

OK, so I tried the built-in IE browser for all of two seconds before you could tell it was slow as hell. Thankfully, I’d been reading up on good Web browser’s for Windows Mobile 5 and two came to mind. Minimo and Opera’s mobile browser. I downloaded them both and gave each a chance to see which one works better. I ended up going w/ Opera because Minimo still needs some work done to it (it is still in beta, maybe even alpha) and didn’t run as smoothly as Opera. Opera’s mobile browser seem to be a nice balance of speed (most important in my book) and function. My only compliant about Opera is it’s built in tabbed browsing. Now, I’m a HUGE fan of tabbed browser on a desktop but on a mobile it doesn’t really work well for me. But, like I mentioned at the top, I don’t use the stylus much so that could affect it.

Side topic: I realize that via the browser I could access my email through Google’s mobile version and I have…it works very well, surprisingly fast. But I prefer a client that I can work on emails, save as drafts, and come back to them. Just FYI.

RSS

So as I mentioned in my last post, I’m trying to cut back on the excessive amount of time I spend checking out my RSS feeds. So I’ve stopped using my PC-based reader and ported only my top 15 feeds over to my smartphone. I’m using a program called Newsbreak and I have to say, it’s been top notch so far. It doesn’t try to be everything to everybody. It’s a straight forward feed reader, it’ll update whenever you tell it to, and will notify you on your ‘Today’ screen when new articles are in. Oh, and navigating through it w/o the stylus is a breeze. Two thumbs up for Newbreak for me! It’s so nice to be able to check up on your news whenever you want. Just today I was waiting on getting my oil changed and was able to catch up on some news while waiting instead of watching Jerry Springer in the waiting area.

Calendar

I’ve done nothing w/ the calendar to date b/c I’m not using Outlook’s version b/c I have Google Calendar. I dig Google’s Calendar and I’m not switching to anything else, I want a way I can publish my calendar to my smartphone. If it means doing that via Outlook, fine. Only thing I’ve found that can do that (supposedly) is RemoteCalendars and I’ve had nothing but bad luck with that app. With it, it’s able to make Outlook work even slower than normal, impressive really.

Contacts

Outlook’s contact section works pretty well I think. Only gripe I have is how it’s viewed on the mobile version. It makes it hard to navigate it without a stylus. I have found this app from Vito Technology that I’m going to setup tomorrow. I’ll update you on that one if I decide to go with it but it looks promising, the easy search option via the buttons seems like it would work for me.

Podcasting

Since I’ve gotten rid of my Creative Zen Micro I no longer had a way to do podcasts during my commute so I downloaded an app. on my smartphone to see if it would be a decent alternative. Found another good app. from Vito called AudioNotes and it’ll let you record in high quality mp3 format and I think it will work out real well. Need to purchase that one, too.

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I had some more stuff below this but it got deleted since I navigated off this page (doh!). This is the main portion I wanted to discuss anyway, I’ll post the rest later along with my updates. Again, comment if you have any app’s you think I should try! Thanks in advance.

[tags]Cingular 8125, Windows Mobile 5, PDA, smartphone, mobile, Opera, Vito, RemoteCalendars[/tags]