The Cingular 8525 seems like a large phone, but it is in a good way. When it is closed, it is almost exactly the same size as a Palm Treo 700p, but it opens to show a large, comfortable QWERTY keyboard, while allowing for a large 2.8-inch screen. HTC, the phone’s original designer, has provided a wealth of navigational buttons, including a five-way button near the screen and a set of arrows on the keyboard, three separate “OK” buttons and a clickwheel on the side.
Calling on the 8525 is solid, with plenty of functions to make calling easier. In addition to speed dial and recent-call listing, the Cingular 8525 allows while-you-type searching of your contact list from within the phone screen. With the keyboard closed, you still have the onscreen touch keys, which are large enough to be usable, as well as voice commands, though not speaker-independent voice dialing.
The Cingular 8525 is rich with e-mail functions, though it’s a bit hobbled when it comes to instant messaging. Cingular’s Xpress Mail service helps speed the process for setting up an e-mail account, though, like BlackBerry’s desktop connect software, it must be running on your PC at all times to push e-mail from your various accounts to your phone. For our purposes, it was better to stick with Outlook running through ActiveSync, though Xpress Mail does allow more flexibility. The keyboard on the 8525 we were using gave us some serious problems.
Like other smartphones that have been tested running the PocketPC edition of Windows Mobile 5.0, the 8525 boasts the ability to view and edit Office documents a big plus in our book, although the phone is still held back by the limitations of Office Mobile. While the 8525 did a great job preserving the formatting of our documents, we found zooming in and out to be a hassle, requiring numerous taps on the menus. We wish this function had been mapped to the clickwheel, especially on PDF files.
In addition, there is no search function on PDFs, which makes browsing larger files more difficult. Cingular’s Xpress Mail required as many steps to download attachments as Outlook, and was a bit less dependable owing to its reliance on your PC. Typing on the device should have been easier, but again, our test phone’s buggy keyboard made Word almost useless.
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