Phones

Sure, I could flash my S620 to the T-Mobile WM6 ROM. I'd rather not [deal with all the T-Mo ...stuff]. Although, I might. Both my JasJar (which I used purely for dev) and my Wizard (Cingular 8100) are now WM6-ified. I'm missing the WM6 goodness on my S620...

For the longest time I was fairly convinced that I was going to get the Cingular 8525. It's a wonderful piece of engineering marvelness, but its hefty price tag sort of kept me from buying it, and looking back on it I'm glad. See, here's the thing: a phone such as the Cingular 8525 (or the Treo 700, etc) is a computer first, then a phone second. What I really needed is a good *phone*, one that is a phone first and computer second, but with all the features I've come to rely on from a smartphone (especially ActiveSync to sync with my hosted Exchange server for all my emails and calendar entries).

Cingular Wireless LLC bought AT&T Wireless, then an independent company, and killed off the AT&T Wireless brand. The owners of Cingular, SBC, then decided to buy AT&T and adopted the brand for its landline services. After AT&T bought Bellsouth Corporation, the other owner of Cingular, the AT&T Wireless brand was restored.

Wall Street Journal is reporting that Cingular and Apple are to be joining forces. Now this isn’t a set in stone fact, but it’s almost 90% true. I surely do hope that Steve Jobs announces the iPhone tomorrow. I have a little bit of money set back right now and might even think of purchasing this phone. I just hope it’s not like any other iTunes enabled phone. Either way, we’ll see tomorrow at MacWorld 2007.

Currently, Cellfire is available only to Cingular Wireless customers in the USA, which leaves me sad (author’s note: Please support Sprint, Together With Nextel next!) and fireless for now, but they are working on becoming available through other providers as soon as possible.

A test of using my Cingular 8125 to post to Flickr and my blog.

Sorry, but I don’t see why we should be upset about “wet-backs” being upset by a ring-tone. They don’t seem to care that we are upset by their presence here.

In conjunction with Earth Day (April 22nd), several companies are partaking in recycling programs. Cingular Wireless is asking consumers to donate old cell phones, phone equipment, and batteries at four Cingular Wireless locations this weekend only, April 21, 22 and 23 during business hours:

Recently I purchased a new cell phone, the Cingular 2125 (yes, you should have gotten my new number …). This is the first “advanced” or “smartphone” I have purchased, and so far, I’m mostly impressed. The feature set is pretty extensive, it’s quite stable, the reception and call quality is absolutely stellar, and with the exception of the fact that it runs Windows and that there is no Wi-Fi, I couldn’t be happier with it. As with any new piece of technology I purchase, I like to push it to the edge, unlock every feature and build everything from the ground up. Nowhere on the web seemed to get it right with the Cingular 2125, so I thought I’d chronicle the adventure that was hacking this phone.

How can a company be this bad when it comes to handling an acquisition? I’ve been an AT&T Wireless subscriber for a while with my Audiovox SMT5600 smartphone. The phone is starting to die, so I wanted to upgrade to the new Cingular 2125 (aka HTC Faraday). Well Cingular bought AT&T Wireless and promptly swapped all my billing and account info. Fine.

My family and I finally did it. We’re on Cingular now. It blows my mind that I can answer calls at work and my apartment! I’m so used to running to the hall or standing in my “spot” to answer calls.

16) Companies like Comcast and Sprint/Cingular will show signs that they’re becoming more comfortable with the fact that they’re simple data pipes and that people want bandwidth, not bundled content or services that only work with “their network.”

Cingular's whole 3G strategy has confused me for a while. First there were phones but no network. Now there's a network and services but no phones. C'mon, guys, get it together. Announce everything at once. Competition is good, so I'd like to see Cingular put as strong a product out there as they can. I'm hoping to see them put their real 3G game face on at CES, the big trade show in January.

From December 1 through December 31, customers of Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint can download Mistletoe wallpaper from Modtones.com, so they can take it along for unlimited kissing. How? By holding the phone over your head or over the head of the person you wish to kiss.

Orange SPV C600 is the same phone as the upcoming Cingular 2125, and it’s reviewed by CoolSmartPhone.com.

My service provider, otherwise know as Cingular, blows. They fuck everything up. Two days ago my mom had text message reactivated on my phone. (I say reactivated because of an incident when I for got the phone, which I will not detail.)

You heard me right. I surfed the web over the weekend and looked for my next mobile phone since my first year contract with Cingular ends next week.

Over the last 7 months that I've had my Treo 650(Cingular model), I've noticed little things that didn't work. Immediately out of the box, I spent two hours on tech support with Cingular regarding how to get the "Voicemail" button, or simply hitting autodial 1 to work. Lately, more and more I notice that it locks up on a constant basis. Now, considering its also a pda, theres a little leeway(at least in my book) for a lockup every once in a while, but the last two weeks or so has been at least once a day, and it seems to only be when someone calls the phone. There has already been one firmware upgrade for the Cingular phones, and I had hoped that the every-once-in-a-while lockups would be in the days past. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, and they got worse.

Following months of testing, Cingular re-launched Audiovox’s little-engine-that-could with a special $199 introductory price (with a two year contract) in early May 2005. Once again reviews were spectacular, and the re-launch happily coincided with the highly anticipated death of my old LG handset. So I dropped my former Sprint service and made the jump to Cingular with a brand new SMT 5600 within the week.

Equally cool is the new Motorola ROKR E1 cell phone. This phone is the first to integrate with iTunes and will be exclusive to Cingular, though i’d imagine other carriers will have iTunes capable phones in the not to distant future. I like my phone and i already have an iPod, so this doesn’t do much for me personally.. though i am glad to see Apple acknowledging (and answering) the upcoming ‘musical’ cell competition.

Apparently the phone will be able to sync with your itunes equipped regular computer and “in a departure” from policy, users will also be able to purchase songs though the network operator. Cingular in the USA, O2 in the UK.

I recently took on the task of installing the newest Cingular ROM/firmware update (1.15) to, hopefully, “improve” my Treo experience. What I actually got were more questions than answers.

I declared war on Cingular today, and I think I lost. Yeah, I lost and I’m not happy. Here is the story. I was with AT&T, which of course was bought out by Cingular. I was informed through the mail that whenever I switched over to a Cingular plan I wouldn’t be penalized for ending my contract with AT&T, since they no longer exist. That is problem #1. Problem #2 is that my plan with AT&T was a local plan, which means I roam when I’m out of WV, KY, and OH…so I’ve been roaming everytime I’ve been to MD/DC. My cell phone bills have been over $100 for the past 2 months, and so far this month I already have about $88 in roaming fees. Problem #2 creates problem #3, because Cingular does not have local plans, only national plans. Great, sign me up. Oh no, they won’t do that.

The good news, besides the fact that the Nokia 6682 is finally available, is that you can purchase it unlocked instead of waiting for Cingular to release theirs, then pay the money to have it unlocked/flashed… yada yada.

Because the V551 is Bluetooth enabled, wireless headsets can be configured with the phone for total handsfree operation. It supports Cingular’s “Fast Forward” call forwarding device, which enables you to easily forward your wireless calls to your land-line phone.

I have a cell phone from Cingular wireless. Their relentless commercials say they have the most overall coverage and the least dropped calls. They are “raising the bar.”

Well not in Omaha, they're not.

I recently switched to Cingular for my cellular service, and of course got a new phone. Like some other people have noted, I’ve been having problems with my new phone’s T9.

Anyway, the task was, indeed, much larger than I expected, which is why I’m now typing it up. Hopefully, Google will find this post and future people trying to do the same thing will be helped out. The technical specs matter a bit, but there is general information (and terminology!) here, too, on getting your connection to work. I’m using a PowerBook, a Nokia 6820, and Cingular is my provider. Sadly, even with my free dial-up into the University’s modem pool, there’s still no such thing as free internet, but this comes close.

We have Cingular cell phones and the coverage was great on Kona. There were only a few dead spots. We brought both of our phones because sometimes Wendy and I went different ways.

If you are a user of Cingular (or AT&T Wireless). MSN Mobile Messaging, which I wrote about in the past, is a really cool feature where you can have a two way conversation between yourself and a mobile phone user.

The MVNO model has been pretty successful in using up excess cell capacity, but you’ll notice that there are not too many MVNO that are using networks other Sprint. Why is that? Because most of the mobile carriers don’t have excess capacity, or at least shouldn’t give up that extra capacity until their core customers are satisfied. Take Cingular for instance who can barely suppor their own users. The MVNO model is all marketing and distribution (7-eleven, Virgin Stores) and that’s where the COGS go way down-much like Open Source.

But the major cellular carriers--Sprint PCS, Verizon Wireless, Cingular,and T-Mobile-- have so far declined to provide such APIs. (This is one of my biggest pet peeves, as I've blogged about before.) This exclusionary policy would be understandable if the carriers were busy rolling out their own location-based services. But they aren't. Mossberg again:

I was also able to get my first experience with number portability. I only use a mobile phone (no landline), so it was very important to me to keep my number as I moved from T-Mobile to Cingular. It may have been because I was calling for business service, but the Cingular customer service reps were all very helpful. I got my phone in just a few days and they scheduled my number to port on that Sunday - and wonder of wonders it ported over without any issue. It is just too bad that it took so long to get number portability.

And, I saw a Cingular online ad that seemed to imply they were better because they have more bars on their signal strength chart. Sort of like the fictitious rock group Spinal Tap whose amplifiers were louder than other rock groups because Spinal Tap’s volume control went to “11″ while the competitors only went to “10″. Uh huh.

God, I love my Cingular phone (Siemens sx66). But, they are simply boneheads when it comes to service. I live on an elevation of about 2 miles above my local city, but Cingular can’t figure out how to give me the same service as those in the “valley”. What’s up with that? I can get Nextel service 100%. Is Nextel that much better? Does Nextel’s network take into account the number of folks that MAY live on a hill in the U.S.?

If you're in the market for a new phone, Cingular has the 5600 for $250 with 2-year contract (online only, I haven't found any stores that have these yet). If you don't want/need a smartphone, they have the silver Motorola RAZR for $199.

I went to the Cingular store before purchasing my Siemens sx66, and the salesman told me that I would be covered completely. After 3 calls to Cingular (twice before Maui and once after Maui), they told me that I’m not covered. Of course, before my trip to Hawaii, the Cingular folks told me I should be fine.

Beginning immediately, most of the nation's wireless carriers -- including Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless, Nextel, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile -- will relay information about abducted children to subscribers who ask to be notified.

Laptop Magazine reviews the new Sony VAIO VGN-T350P notebook with built-in Cingular EDGE connectivity. Quote: "Freedom. That's what separates the Sony VAIO VGN-T350P from the ultraportable pack. This tiny three-pounder is the first notebook .

Richard Goetter, Marketing Manager for Palm OS Solutions - Cingular Wireless is giving a presentation on Mobilizing Business Processes on Palm OS: Best Practices and Lessons Learned. That should be interesting. Businesses are still only scratching the surface of what can be done to utilize mobile technologies in the field. There are so many opportunities to improve processes, speed up response times and enable access to corporate resources.

We feel sorta bad now for having raised anyone’s hopes when we passed along the news the other day that the iPAQ hw6500 Mobile Messenger was supposed to be out in the States by September (on Cingular, in case you were keeping track), but the ever-reliable Pocket PC Thoughts reports that HP has pushed back the release of the hw6500 until November in order to avoid a repeate of the same quality control issues they’d had with the h6315 Pocket PC Phone.

I was checking out some stuff on the internet and I found a cool link to upload stuff to your cell phone. This is from their site (weblogstoolscollection.com):

The results are in. In a head-to-head comparison between my Cingular wireless card and Glenn Reynold's Verizon wireless card, Verizon clocked in at 112.9 kbps, while Cingular came in at 353.4 kbps. We used CNET's Bandwidth Meter Speed Test for the comparison.

UPDATE: My original results seemed abnormally high and they were - I had forgotten to disable my wi-fi connection and it took precedence over my Cingular connection. I've updated my results after re-testing. Still quicker than Verizon, but then again there's no Verizon wireless broadband service in Nashville

Cingular Wireless is launching the Audiovox SMT 5600 Windows Mobile 2003 smartphone handset. The tri-band (850/1800/1900 MHz) GSM/GPRS handset will feature Bluetooth wireless, VGA camera with 4x digital zoom, and speaker phone.

The first place I turned was Cingular, my current wireless provider. Turns out they had exactly the phone I wanted, the Blackberry 7100g, but here is where they start the process of doing whatever they can to alienate the customer.

A couple of weeks ago I said that I was switching from T-Mobile to Cingular because I wanted the Treo 650 and I wanted the bandwidth that was available from Cingular. The greater bandwidth allows me to run Chatter Email, a full IMAP email client that is the most Blackberry-like email implementation I've seen on a PalmOS device. It works, it's worth it, and I'm not looking back.

Oh — this is great! Keep reading. The telemarketer that called me today, laid her thoughts on the line. Nextel is in deep trouble with the coming merger. After spending a week with John Gormly, and salivating at his Cingular phone, I finally decided that Nextel is not the wave of my future. The lady I talked to from Nextel today was very candid and said, basically, the same thing. She told me that the future of Nextel is pretty dang blurry, and that she was also looking at other options.

The two sides also have very different perspectives on how digital music stores should work. Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular are expected to charge about $2 for wireless downloads when they introduce their services, or twice the 99 cents per song on iTunes. They figure they can charge a premium for the convenience of getting songs anytime, even though customers most likely won’t be able to listen to those songs anywhere but on their phones, at least initially. One knowledgeable source close to Apple says the operators are simply being unrealistic...

Let's start from the beginning. I had a phone line through PacBell seven or eight years ago. When I left California, I had the phone turned off, and never thought anything of it until I moved in to this apartment. I tried to get phone service, and they told me that I had a balance remaining from the old line. I couldn't afford to pay it off, so my mom put my phone in her name. Subsequently, when I added DSL and Cingular, they were in her name as well.

So I called Cingular to debate a 63-minute "Oper Asst" call, and although my mother had me authorized on the SBC end of things, Cingular didn't have that authorization, so she wouldn't talk to me. I decided then that since I'm in a better financial position than I was then, I'd go ahead and pay off the old bill and get all this stuff moved back over into my name. After talking to half a dozen people, no one could find the old account at all. So it turns out that I don't owe them anything at all.

Today, I call Cingular back to dispute the 63-minute call, and just conveniently forgot to mention that I'm not my mother. I got a credit on my account for that call. I also found out that the plan I currently have (300 anytime, 1000 nights and weekends) doesn't have mobile-to-mobile. That made me freak a bit, because Shaunta and I have talked a lot on our cell phones, thinking I had the mobile-to-mobile. So, for $10, I upgraded. Now I have 450 anytime, 5000 nights/weekends, rollover, unlimited mobile-to-mobile, free long distance, and free nationwide...

Business Week reports that Verizon, Sprint and Cingular will all unveil their own music download services for mobile phones later this year. According to the article, wireless providers aren't crazy about using Apple's iTunes service because it relies on downloading tunes to a computer first, then transferring to the mobile handset as opposed to a direct download to the mobile handset. While cynics and iPod-o-philes might decry this as purely greedy, it seems to me that the real convenience of downloading music to a phone is downloading to...

Then came a company called Cingular. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless. This should be no problem, right? The name on the bill changes, I send my checks to a different company, but other than that, no biggie right?

» Home of Gadgets > Mobiles > Cingular Releases Exclusive Star Wars Mobile Content

Cingular Releases Exclusive Star Wars Mobile Content

Cingular customers now have access to a diverse and most anticipated collection of wireless content from Revenge of the Sith and other chapters of the Star Wars saga.

Cingular is thrilled to drive this universal demand for Star Wars content to the wireless arena, giving more than 49 million Cingular customers access to a “Jabba"-sized collection of original mobile content.

“The Star Wars brand is recognized and loved by people of all ages,” said John Burbank, Vice President of Marketing, Cingular Wireless. “Fans of the Star Wars saga will appreciate the virtually anytime, anywhere access they’ll have to their favorite Star Wars moments and characters directly from their Cingular handset. I think it’s safe to say we’ve got the hottest wireless ticket in town.”

“We’re excited that Cingular is giving our fans the ability to download so many of their favorite Star Wars sounds, music and graphics directly to their Cingular handset,” said Jim Ward, Vice President of Marketing and Distribution for Lucasfilm. “With the release of Revenge of the Sith, we are celebrating a saga that spans almost 30 years. It’s great to work with Cingular to invite millions of people to celebrate this moment with us.”

THQ Wireless Inc., a global leader in mobile entertainment and subsidiary of THQ Inc., is teaming up with Cingular to offer downloadable Star Wars content such as music tones, voice tones of movie quotes, sound effect tones, mobile games, animated screensavers, colorful wallpaper graphics and MMS greeting cards as well as cast interviews, character biographies, behind-the-scene features, and trivia based on the previous five films. Cingular’s collection of official Star Wars content, to be rolled out over the next five months, will include:

Cingular customers can download their favorite Star Wars ringtones, graphics and greeting cards starting at $1.99. Star Wars games will start at $5.99. Customers have a direct link to Star Wars content by accessing the web through their Cingular phone or PC (by clicking here). The site will be updated with new, dynamic content every few weeks, making it a true blockbuster experience for Star Wars fans. Downloadable content for Revenge of the Sith will be available beginning April 4, 2005.

Beginning April 5 through June 4, Cingular Wireless will offer the Sony Ericsson S710 and the Sony Ericsson Z500a with free preloaded Star Wars content. The S710, which retails for $449.99, will be offered at a special promotional price of $399.99 with a two-year contract. The preloaded Z500a will retail for $49.99 with a two-year contract and a $30 mail-in rebate. Both exclusive, limited edition packages will include:

Additionally, when Cingular customers purchase either one of the special preloaded Sony Ericsson devices, they will receive two free movie tickets to see Revenge of the Sith.

So today I got my bill for my Atlanta trip. I surely was not ready for that. It was ridiculously high. So I did what any broke college student would do, I called to complain. Now, I was not just calling to complain because I can, I actually had good reason.

Good job Cingular, you just kept one customer (for now), which is good, because I really did not want to have to cancel my contract and lose my rollover minutes. Those things (rollover minutes) are great.

The second story I noticed was that Cingular had convinced bands to release their songs as ringtones before singles. Coldplay will be the first band, and their new song “Speed of Sound” will be available as a new ringtone six days before it gets played on the radio and a couple of months before their new album comes out in June.

Okay, so tell me about your cell phone and carrier. I lost mine, and it turns out, according to T-Mobile, that my contract's up anyway, so it'll be cheaper for me to just get a new one with someone else. So. I'm thinking it's going to be either Cingular, 'cause the rest of my family has Cingular and I'd get the free mobile-to-mobile minutes (plus, they just ate AT&T, so they'll have decent coverage), or Verizon, 'cause Verizon has the best network in the country (so-so phones and expensive plans, though). Suggestions? ...

I'm leaning towards Cingular, since I know someone with the exact phone I'd want, and she has no complaints.

The first two operators to allow cross-carrier photo-mail swapping are No. 1 cell phone company Cingular Wireless and No. 2 operator Verizon Wireless, which combined account for 93 million of the 180 million U.S. cell phone subscribers. It's likely the operators' agreement, quietly put into place in the last few weeks, will spur Sprint and other top U.S. operators to reach similar pacts.