*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Last week was Tech Ed week.  Sorry I didn’t blog any entries on it.  I was still recovering from my web host loosing 2 months of my data.  It is hard to recover from a loss like that.  Not to mention  I spent ALL of my energy walking 11 miles a day riding the bus back and forth from the conference.  Everything you’ve read about the bus and traffic situation in regards to this year’s Tech Ed is absolutely true.  Enough of that though, let’s talk about the goods!

Now that Tech Ed is over, the raffles and drawings are being done by the vendors.  Everyone that went to Tech Ed and registered at every single vendor’s booth like I did should be checking their spam filters daily during this time just in case something gets caught.  That would be terrible to actually win and not know about it.  

Last night I learned that I was the Tuesday winner of the “Cingular Mobility Pack”.  This is a GREAT win because it includes all of the following hotness:

1. Cingular 8125 Pocket PC Phone (HTC Wizard, I-Mate K-Jam, etc) ($499.00)
2. Cingular 2125 Mobile 5 Smartphone  ($299)
3. Sierra Wirelss Aircard 860 PC Modem ($199)

Is this complete hotness or what!!!!!? Depending on how you rate the price of the 8125 phone, this is a $1000 or $1200 retail value.   For those “not in the know” let me explain the 8125 phone real quick.  First and foremost it is a Pocket PC with a sliding keyboard.  Allthough it is branded as the 8125 from Cingular it is in fact known as the HTC Wizard since HTC is the manufacturer.  It is also known as the I-Mate K-Jam, the QTec 9100 and so on.   The phone has WIFI, Bluetooth, full keyboard etc.  It is a beast of a phone and a great form factor.

The same phone in an I-Mate K-Jam unlocked version was being sold at a discounted price at Tech Ed for $630 so it isn’t a cheap device by any strech of the imagination.  When I went to the Cingular web site to grab the links I noticed they are running a special on the 8125 phone right now for $189.99.  But that is one of those sign up new plan deals, not if you just walk in and buy it.

The funny thing is I picked up an 8125 while at Tech Ed and as of Monday I’ve been enjoying Direct Push email on it after applying the new update.  I’ll be doing a post about the phone later to give you some more insight.

Quick FYI:  For my personal taste I liked the K-Jam phone better because of the keyboard.  But $630.. are you kidding me?  I was talking to Steve Riley about his K-Jam phone and his take on it was to get the QTec version of the “HTC Wizard” phone because the K-Jam comes with software that slows it down.  Anyway, now I have 2 8125’s and a 2125.  I’ll probably give the 2125 to my wife if she wants it.  Of course, one of the 8125’s is going on Ebay. 

Josh Holmes won an I-Mate K-Jam at one of the parties on Tuesday night and he proudly rubbed it in our face all week. So for Josh, back at you now buddy!!!!!!!!!!

Update 6/24/2006 8:56 AM
It turns out the wife doesn’t want the 2125 phone.  She wants to keep her Motorola phone that she has been using for almost 2 years now. Her unwillingness to change is my personal gain! So as it stands I think what I’m going to do is keep both the 8125 and the 2125 and simply swap them out when I need to.  For example if I go mountain biking, fishing, running, saving the whales, solving world peace and hunger or whatever I’ll just take the sim card out (another reason to have a GSM phone thank you very much Verizon) and put it into the smaller 2125. 

My OEM 2GB MiniSD with SD Converter came in that I picked up from Digital Media off of Amazon for the low price of $40.  Not only is the price outsanding, but having the ability to convert the mini to a standard SD card is awesome.