Phone Shopping Friday - What Can We Say About Cingular?
As a Cingular customer it pains me to tell you that Cingular might possibly have the worst selection of phones of any carrier in the US. It has now dropped the Nokia 36XX phones, which were bulky but usable, leaving the Treo 600 as the only smartphone in the lineup. No matter how much certain Engadgeteers love the Treo, even they will admit it has its shortcomings.
What Cingular does have is two decent feature phones - the Motorola V600 and the Sony Ericsson T637. Despite the fact that the Motorola is a rather handsome Quad-band flip phone and it has a VGA camera with a built-in LED flash, it still has the battery life of, well, a Motorola. Since Engadget will never, no matter how cool it is, recommend a phone that can barely make it through one busy day without a recharge, we're going to have to say skip the V600 and head straight over to the Sony Ericsson T637.
Some people think the new Sony Ericsson K700 is the hottest phone around, and spec wise it definitely beats out the T637, but we think the T637 is the best designed phone in existence. Seriously. It's tiny, has a very usable keypad, a great screen and has the sleekest, most fashionable lines of any phone ever. Plus Cingular's T637 comes in black, not white like the T630, so it doesn't look like an iPod/iBook/iWhatever rip-off. (And black is the new black, didn't you hear?)
Sure the T637 has a few shortcomings: the camera is not VGA and the controls for it are hidden (you use the joystick to control brightness and contrast, but the interface never indicates this. Java or Morphun downloads take forever to launch (although it's not nearly as bad as the T610). And it takes far too many clicks to address an SMS. Physically, the T637's only flaw is the somewhat weak signal strength.
But the T637 also has amazing battery life and a camera that takes surprisingly good pictures for its resolution. It also has a very easy to use menu system with user-skinnable themes. It has an excellent Bluetooth implementation. It syncs easily with Macs and PCs. And it fits in any pocket, even the super tiny change pocket on your slim-fit low-rise Levi's. Plus it's at least $100 cheaper than the V600. Until Cingular launches the Nokia 6230 or other upcoming handsets, this really is your best bet.
