Siemens SX1

Hey there, glad you liked the response. If you can't tell, I'm a cheerleader for this phone and despite the problems I'm experiencing, it really is quite cool.

O.K., here goes.

Agreed on the size. It isn't "tiny" the way some phones are, but I consider it to be small, definitely to where you COULD put it in your pocket if you wanted to. I've had bad experiences with this on my previous phone. Pocket lint tends to get caught in the connection ports for the charger, usb cable, etc.

On some of your questions, I think you might be asking too much. I'm not a Palm Pilot/Pocket PC expert, but do those even have the capability of having other USB devices plug into them? I don't think so, but I'm not sure. So to answer your question, no, you can't plug in other usb devices and have it function as a USB host. I don't know of any other handsets on the market that do this.

You'll need the Siemens Data Suite software to be loaded on your pc. It is simple, easy, and free from Siemen's website. When you first plug in the phone via the included usb cable to your pc, the pc will recognize it as new hardware. I hit cancel the first time thinking the Siemens Data Suite software would find it, but it could not. You have to let Win2000/XP go ahead and do its thing to install the necessary drivers. I think it gets them from the Data Suite somehow but I'm not sure. Once this happens, a little icon of a phone will show up in the lower right in your quick launch bar. You can't really do anything with it though. Then you launch the Data Suite software and sometimes you have to unplug the phone and plug it back in, and then the software recognizes it and has a message that says "phone detected" which then goes to "Siemens SX-1". The software isn't the best I've ever seen, but you can do most things from it.

You have to use the software to install apps onto the phone, as in games, and any other stuff you find. There's an app install section on there. There's also a button to offload pictures you've taken from the phone, a data transfer function which will show you the two "drives" on the phone. c: drive is the phone's internal memory, d: drive is the memory card. You can drag and drop stuff into these directories like you would in Windows Explorer. In fact, this is how you would transfer mp3's to the phone if you wanted to put them on there, BUT, I wouldn't do that. It takes FOREVER!! I would invest the $10-$15 for a card reader and use that. That's what I do. I plug my MMC card in there, the card reader plugs into the usb port on my pc which then mounts it as a removeable drive, and I drag and drop my mp3's into the mp3 directory on the MMC card. It is probably 10 times faster than going through the phone.

Nope, you can't hook up the phone to the pc and use the camera as a device controlable and viewable through the pc. At least I've never seen that option in the Siemens Data Suite. the Data Suite also has a huge section for configuration. This is where you go to configure syncing your contacts list from Outlook, which drives you want to do backups of (C: or D: drive), and some other stuff.

The phone has GPRS on it for accessing the internet. This can be used for text messaging, and text surfing with the default stuff the phone comes with. There are so many apps for this phone (all Symbian OS phones in fact) though that you should check them out. I was using a demo of one called "ProfileMail" that was a nice GUI interface to pop mail. I had it set up to check my yahoo mail. Check out www.sx1-software.com (I think there's a dash in there, if it doesn't work, do a google search). That's where I bought a video game that I had on my phone.

You asked about surfing the web which is also possible. T-Mobile gives unlimited t-zones access for $5 a month, (hehe .... muhahaha...) which they probably think everyone will use the tiny text-based surfing in their GPRS phones. If you get the Opera web browser (google on opera, it is supported on Symbian OS phones) you can surf the web with pictures and everything. I downloaded the trial version and it really was quite cool. Ebay, cnn.com, etc. The pages are pretty tiny and still it isn't perfect to navigate. It made the phone crash a few times though particularly on busy pages (lots of stuff to load) like cnn.com. The Opera software was $30 I think and I couldn't see spending the money when the trial period was over. I might still get it though.

A few other things to mention that I remembered. The apps you install don't always play nicely with the profiles in the phone, i.e. if you have the phone in the mute profile, and go to play a game (say in the bathroom while you're sitting there) the game's volume might come on full blast even though the phone is muted. Ask me how I know. Also, the phone only has one jack for the USB cable, the charger, and the headphones. Consequently, you can only do one thing at a time. If the phone is charging, I can't listen to mp3's (unless I want to do it through the main speaker where everyone in my vicinity would be disturbed). Or if you're doing a usb data transfer to the phone, you can't charge it at the same time.

Hope that helps.

Flipwils,
Chicago, USA