Back in September I reluctantly gave up my trusty Treo 650 for a Blackberry 8700c, because at the time the only way to get remote access to Amazon’s IT services was through RIM. The 8700c was fairly reliable, though there were some annoying UI glitches, and it wasn’t very fast. The scroll wheel seems like a good idea, but try navigating Google Maps with it! (Hint: use Alt+wheel for left-to-right movement.) More seriously, I became increasingly frustrated with aspects of the enterprise integration, with calendar updates being notoriously hit-or-miss.
Recently Amazon IT started trial support for Windows Mobile devices, and when I was in California 9 days ago I got a chance to check out Steve‘s new phone. And so this Saturday I switched: I’m now the proud owner of a Cingular 8525 PDA/phone. It’s a full-blown 3G device: tri-band UMTS/HSDPA, and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE. It’s really fast!! It has WiFi (which was trivial to set up), a decent camera, and a slide-out keyboard. Memory expansion is via micro-SD card: I’m not exaggerating when I say that the 1GB card that I bought is the same size as my little finger nail.
It’s going to take a while for me to get used to this beast: it has a lot of built-in applications, and there’s a thriving software ecosystem out there for Windows Mobile (unlike the Blackberry). I’ll let you know what I find. I’ve already been able to rip and scale a DVD into a format that I can play on the 8525.
Meanwhile, I’m going to sell my 8700c to an Amazon colleague – although when he sees the 8525, who knows….?
UPDATE: The 8525 is a version of the HTC Hermes device. Lots of details here.