I've finally moved to a 3G phone. I am a Cingular customer so I've been waiting for 3G for a while, while my friends and colleagues who are Verizon and Sprint customers get to play with their EV-DO phones. Cingular finally rolled out UMTS a few months ago and has a couple of phones available. I've got an old Motorola a845 UMTS phone but that thing is a brick. So I decided to use the LG CU500 for my personal phone (we have had them in house for testing for a while). Normally I'm a Nokia user, have been since the 8290 came out about 6 years ago, but Cingular is only offering the LG and the Samsung ZX10. I've had enough testing time with Samsungs to avoid that one. The LG CU500 is sweet. I am able to use it as a high speed connection (HSDPA) for my laptop via bluetooth. I am able to get over 600kbps download speeds (According to the Speakeasy speed test
). I think that is probably constricted by the Bluetooth and guess I could probably do better if I was to use the USB cable. The really great thing though is I am now able to connect to the internet, anywhere in the Cingular UMTS network. No more being pissed off at the airport becuase the there's no free WiFi.
I'm pretty happy with the LG CU500 as a phone as well. It's my first flip-phone. I've always been a fan of the candy-bar form afactor. The jury is still out on the reception. It's a pretty well thought out user experience as well and I have been very pleased with how easy the interface is to navigate and how well thought out everything is. The only real downside so far is the battery life. I've taken to turning the Bluetooth off when not using it, but the batter life is still not stellar compared to my previous phone, the Nokia 6682.
So I am a believer in 3G now. No way I could go back to GPRS. After almost 7 years, WAP is FINALLY usuable!