Cell Phones and Providers

[Leshrak]

I've had an 8525 for about 6 months now, I love it. As far as reception goes, it's better than any other phone i've used on AT&T (I've had AT&T/Cingular for 3 years now), call quality is pretty decent, and I love the keyboard for texting. I've even got a program called PocketPUTTY that I can thresh from. Battery life is so so, it lasts about 2.5-4 hours, depending on the brightness of the screen, the camera is decent for a phone camera, and the bluetooth works well. I just clocked my download speed on the UMTS network by my house at .7 megabits/sec (85 kb/sec) with half-signal (they JUST upgraded the towers near me to UMTS, it is so great).

My favorite part of the phone, though, is that you can charge it from any device that's got a powered USB port (the port for the charger is a usb 2.0 port, so it uses a standard USB 2.0 cable).

One thing though, if you get one of these phones and plan on using the browser/google maps, you'll need the unlimited internet plan. They've actually got 2 unlimited internet plans, one goes for 19.99/month (Unlimited MEdia Net), and the other is 34.99 (their PDA Connect plan). Don't get suckered into the 34.99 plan, because they're both the same thing for the connection (I think the 34.99 includes some support for corporate e-mail servers or some garbage).

Edit: That 2.5-4 hours is talk time, not standby. It will usually stand by for 2 days with moderate use before it dies.