Well, my venerable Motorola mpx220 has been acting unreliably lately, and after over two years of service, I figured it would be a good time to upgrade. I did a bit of scanning around, and settled on upgrading to the new LG CU500, which is equipped with Cingular’s new HSDPA networking stuff, enabling them to do video via MobiTV or their own CIngular Video service. I thought going to the high speed data would be useful: I don’t normally use real data services, but I like to be able to read RSS feeds via my phone while standing in lines and I like checking out the local movie times.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to keep this phone.

It’s got some minor annoyances compared to my previous phone.

• Menus, submenus, and sub-sub menus. The Motorola Smartphone I used to have created a list of recently used applications that you could access easily. There are some dedicated keys on this phone to do the same thing, but it takes some getting used to.
• Sucky WAP only browser. This wouldn’t matter too much, I could just download Opera for it, but…
• Java refuses to grant permanent permissions to establish network connections to apps which aren’t signed by Cingular. You get the “Yes, Grant” / “No, never” dialog every single time. Bleh. This is the real dealbreaker for me.
• Oh, no email client either. Or voice dialing.
• I’m having difficulty getting bluetooth to work with it from my ubuntu box, but that could just be my fault or Ubuntu’s.

I’m pondering using my “buyer’s remorse” period to exchange it for the Samsung D807. It doesn’t have the HSDPA, but it does have EDGE (which is all I can get most places I am anyway) and does have email. If I can confirm that Java apps will work properly on it, I think I’ll have a winner.

[tags]Samsung D807,LG CU500,Cell Phone[/tags]