Hawk’s Babble-Log

I got a great deal from Cingular: I extend my contract for two years and they give me a free phone, plus $20 credit towards my bill!

Recently Cingular merged networks with AT&T, so now I’m just about always in a good area. It’s great now, because before I couldn’t even use my cell phone at home! Now I can, and it works well with the new phone.

So… I was going to stick with Cingular anyway.

Lemme tell ya… My new phone is great! This little sucker is a big improvement over my last one, which was a Motorola T720. It’s about the same size so it fits in my existing holster. It is improved in just about every area over my last one. It came with a SmartChip which was twice the capacity of my old one, but I didn’t want to enter in all my phone numbers again, so I just swapped out my old one. The phone knew who I was and had all my numbers! I love modern technology.

It’s got a little camera built-in, and seems to take decent pics so far, but I have not transferred any of them over to a big screen so we’ll see about that later on. To transfer the pics, I can either get a cable (looks like it would be a USB), or I can subscribe to some kind of networking service (such as Email), which is probably what I’ll do because this little phone has AIM built-in! I’m kinda eager to try that out.

I’ve been customizing it over the last day or so, and it is VERY customizable. It came with a demo game from Jamdat, but it’s tough to play on such a tiny screen, and it wasn’t all that fun anyway.

There are lots of opportunities to buy something. I can buy ringtones, music, pics, etc. The phone puts the Buy option on top of the menu, which is kinda annoying.

The charger is not compatible with my old one, but I can use my existing headset with it, so that’s good. Plus, it’s got a speakerphone built-in! Nice for conferencing or playing recorded messages.

So far, the little guy passes with flying colors! I can’t remark on anything bad about it as yet. I’ll update this blog with additional info as I make more discoveries.

UPDATE 2005-02-20:

I’ve got a nice package deal from Cingular for all my multimedia needs. I can email pics that I take to any email address. I took these today:

640 x 480

320 x 240

160 x 120

It’s interesting that the interface for the camera has a zoom symbol for the UP key, and an unzoom symbol for the DOWN key. When looking at the image displayed by the camera, this appears to zoom the camera. But, in fact, all it really does is reduce the size of the image. Attention Motorola developers: That’s not a “zoom”.

The three images above were taken in each of the three fake-zoom modes.

I don’t know what the megapixel rating is, but I think the first one is pretty darn good for a phone.

Dang, I love modern technology!