pre-christmas gadget review extravaganza (part I)

Since next week is Thanksgiving (and thus, the day after Thanksgiving), I thought I would do a little pre-holiday shopping season reviewing of some new(ish) gadgets that are floating around the jlb.to Headquarters (aka, Basement Central, Litterbox Zone, and "Where's that Smell Coming From?" Area).

For today, I've chosen the new cell phone I picked up last week as an item to review. The model is made by Siemens. (OK, get it out of your system now -- Siemens Siemens Siemens Siemens... Feel better? Great.)

The Siemens S56 is a GSM (or "third-generation" phone) and is currently sold in the United States by Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless. As a current AT&T Wireless customer, I wasn't too interested in commiting to another contract extension (they already have my ass until Nov. 2004) for $50 off or paying the full price of the phone to upgrade.

So, I went to my friendly (hardly), easy to shop (Ha! Ha! Ha!), nearby (well, that's mostly true) Best Buy store in search of a better deal on the phone with "Cingular" stamped on it.

For $99 and a one-year contract, the phone was mine. An unnoticed by me store rebate of $100 knocks the price down to less than nothing, before tax. That was definitely cool.

I had picked Cingular for another reason. They're currently running a very intriguing promotion that allows you to forward all of your cell calls to any one of three phone numbers you program in to your phone. You need to buy a $40 cradle (which doubles as a fairly convenient charger) and pay an additional $2.99 per month for FastForward service. But forwarded calls do not count against your wireless minutes -- a big change from all other wireless forwarding.

Back to FastForward in a minute. The phone is the real star of this B-movie review.

For me, two of the biggest draws of the S56 were its purported good reception and integrated Bluetooth.

Obviously, anyone not from Afghanistan understands good reception on a cell phone. But Bluetooth is still largely a mystery for many cell phone owners (and the general populous).

Bluetooth is a wireless communication standard that allows electronic devices to communicate with each other over short ranges. It uses the ever-popular 2.4 ghz "junk band," like many cordless phones and WiFi (AirPort, 802.11b, and 802.11g), to connect and share bits. Bluetooth can be used to connect two computers as an ad-hoc network to share files, for a wireless mouse and keyboard, connect a wireless headset to a cell phone, or connect the cell phone and the computer, for example.

The latter was what I really wanted. Recently, Apple Computer made improvements to its own Bluetooth software and a free application called iSync. Using these super cool tools, you can share your entire address book and calendar with your cell phone or Palm PDA.

It took me less than 10 minutes of setup to have the phone and my Power Mac G5 (using a D-Link USB-to-Bluetooth adapter) talking to each other. In the Bluetooth world, that's called pairing. Just seconds more and my entire address book was on the S56. In just a few more minutes, I had created a calendar with a few items in Apple's free iCal program and uploaded that to the phone. And, since syncing is as easy as clicking one button on my Mac, I can have an updated contact list and calendar whenever I want and wherever I go.

Definitely a big thumbs up for Siemens on the Bluetooth integration. I had previously tried this with a Sony Ericcson T68i from T-Mobile, but both the phone's Bluetooth and Apple's software were inferior at the time. The current combination is a clear winner.

Back to the basics of the phone. It has, more or less, all of the bells and whistles of any phone these days. Small, lightweight, color screen, small keys (sometimes hard to press the right one), polyphonic ringtones, vibrating alert, alarms, the previously mentioned address book and calendar, and Wide Area Protocol (WAP) Internet access. Well, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles -- literally.

For some odd reason, the phone is missing a regular ring sound. That's right, it can mimic almost any song or sound using polyphonic ringtones, but it doesn't just ring. I had to download and install (via Bluetooth, very very cool) a few regular ringers. But I should not have had to search the Internet to find plain ringers. These should ALWAYS be on the phone.

Frankly, the ring was the least of my worries. Here in the jlb.to Headquarters, I rarely get even remotely good cell phone reception. My AT&T Motorola T720 is frequently lost in "No Service" or "Emergency Only" modes.

That, of course, means no calls in or out.

I was hoping that Cingular's signal would be better. We've seen that Sprint's CDMA (another older cellular technology, being edged out by GSM) signal can penetrate the depths of the basement world. However, Cingular's signal on the S56 is actually worse.

The S56 spends nearly its entire time in "Network Search" and, when it rarely finds a signal, it can't hold on for any longer than a few seconds.

Upstairs and outside, where the T720 does fairly well with AT&T's signal, the S56 is still searching. These areas are also good for the Sprint and T-Mobile (also GSM) users among us.

There's no way to tell, shy of buying another phone model and testing it, if this is a problem with the Siemens S56 or Cingular, but I would actually put my money on a little of each. Where the Cingular signal is definitely strong, in downtown Bethesda, the phone still seems to have trouble locking on to Cingular's signal.

Rewinding to FastForward, overall, the service appears great on the surface, though my experience was not all that great. In order to get the service to engage, you need to put the phone in the previously mentioned cradle. It then sends a signal wireless through the phone to the Cingular switch which tells the network to now forward all calls to one of the three local numbers you have programmed.

However, since I can't get a signal in the jlb.to Headquarters, the service never engages. I just get errors when I put the phone on the cradle. When I took the phone and cradle upstairs, searched for a free outlet, and put it all together, it seemingly worked like a charm. My calls were forwarded, caller ID and all, to my regular phone line.

To disengage FastForward service, you must first push the Cancel button on the cradle, while the phone is still seated in it. Failing to do so means that your calls are still forwarded. There is a four-digit number to dial if you accidentally forget to push Cancel. But, again, in the basement there was no way to engage or cancel FastForward.

Finally, one huge complaint against Cingular. When the geniuses activated my phone, they assigned me a phone number in area code 301 -- same as my current phone number. However, the exchange they used is for a phone company central office in Waldorf, Md. Waldorf (look it up on Mapquest) could not really be much further from Bethesda and still be in Maryland. It is clear on the other side of Washington, D.C. to the southeast.

And, it's a long distance call from Bethesda to my cell phone. Duh.

Clearly, Cingular has some way to go before it becomes a grownup cell phone provider. The Siemens S56 is an apparently quality phone that may or may not suffer from poor signal reception. But the Bluetooth and integration with Apple iSync, Address Book, and iCal is amazing. I would like to keep the phone for just those reasons, but the signal problems and other issue with Cingular will have me returning the phone and cancelling the service.

But now I am considering buying the same phone from AT&T Wireless...

Posted by jonathan at November 19, 2003 04:38 AM