What’s less common is that it’s impossible to get a simple headphone adapter for it. The only adapters I can find have an 80cm long cable ending in a combined volume control/3.5mm socket. When you add in the length of your regular headphones that’s a serious amount of cable!

The 3125 is a pretty decent media player and great for places like the gym. I decided to I’d take the headphones that came with the phone and perform a little surgery to make my own compact adapter

Requirements;

• A 3.5mm Jack from Radio Shack (~$2)
• A soldering iron and basic skills
• Fine wire strippers
• A set of helping hands
• Patience

The first step is to decide where you want the adapter to be. You can either have it after the volume control/mic which allows you to retain that functionality but results in a lot of cable, or you can place it a lot closer to the Micro-USB plug which gives you a more compact adapter (but is harder to solder).

Attaching the jack after the volume control is the simplest option. Snip off the ear buds and trim the black rubber (a scalpel works best) to expose 1cm of the inner wires. Each cable should have one gold wire (-ve) and one colored wire (+ve). Unscrew the 3.5mm Jack (remembering to thread the cable through the casing!) and solder one colored wires to each of the inner posts. Then solder both of the gold wires to the outer band. Tightly screw the Jack back together and you should be good to go.

Attaching the Jack before the volume control is a little more tricky. Snip the cable somewhere below the volume control (I left about 2″ from the USB plug) and carefully trim the rubber casing on the outer wire to expose the inner micro-wires. This time one outer wire will have four micro-wires and one will have three.

The way I figured this out was to crack open the volume control and examine the inner wiring, but if your headphones are the same as mine then;

The collection of four micro-wires are the ones we are interested in and are;

• Red – Right Audio (+ve)
• Red/Gold – Left Audio (+ve)
• Gold – Audio (-ve)
• Red/Green – Audio (-ve)

The collection of three should be trimmed and sealed, but they are

• Green – Data
• White – Mic(+ve)
• Gold – Mic(-ve)

Soldering the four micro wires is quite tricky and you will need a good set of helping hands to hold the parts in place.

The Red and Red/Gold wires must be attached to the two inner posts and I found it easiest to do these first. The best way to solder this type of wire is by “tinning” it – E.g. first applying a small amount of solder to the end of the wire, then soldering the wire to the surface.

After you have soldered the inner wires you must solder the Gold & Red/Green wires to the outer band. Again, first tinning the wires is the best approach here.

 

 After soldering all four wires plug in a set of headphones and test the sound quality. It should be clear and crisp. If there is any crackling or drop out (particularly when you gently shake the jack) then there’s a bad solder contact that must be redone.

 And hey presto! Your very own mini-headphone adapter for the Cingular 3125.

My first attempts to use Windows Mobile Device Center resulted in a lot of problems. Neither my T-Mobile MDA (aka Cingular 8125, aka HTC Wizard) or my Cingular 3125 (aka HTC StarTrek) would synchronize with Outlook 2003. Instead the synchronization would fail with with an unhelpful error of “The Server Is Busy”.

Some Googling showed me other people with Vista having similar problems, but no solutions, so I thought I’d post the steps that got things working for me.

By going to “Mobile Device Settings” and unchecking each category in turn I found the problem was related to contacts.  Within Outlook I created a new PST file (File->New->Outlook Data File), temporarily moved all my contacts there, and then closed the file.

Now, without any contacts in Outlook, I retried the synchronization and this time it completed successfully. The contacts from my phone were now in my list of Outlook Contacts.

As my original Outlook contacts were more upto date, I reopened the temporary PST file, copied them over the newly-synchronized versions, and started another synchronization. Again it completed successfully, afterwhich both sets of contacts were in sync.

Since using this initial workaround I haven’t had any sync problems on either device, so if you’re having similar issues hopefully this will get things working for you.

Enjoy!

After dialing the Iowa number I was then prompted to dial my international number as normal, E.g. 011 44 131 555 5555 – An international call to the UK, City of Edinburgh, number 555-5555. It worked perfectly!

The downside of this service (apart from its undoubtedly short life expectancy) is you need to dial a heck of a lot of numbers, and if you don’t have peoples numbers committed to memory it becomes even more awkward.

Luckily there’s a trick, one I used to use to automatically dial through to regularly called extensions.

Placing ’p’ in the middle of a number causes most cellphones to pause for a few seconds when dialing. This allows you to append the extension to the saved number, but delay the dialing of that part until the automated switchboard has picked up.

However, my T-Mobile MDA wouldn’t let me insert a p while dialing, nor did the Ericsson trick of holding * for a few seconds work. I found the solution was to enter the complete number, including the p’s, as a number for a contact and then dial that contact as normal.

Two p’s seemed to cause the right amount of delay. I also found that inserting brackets in the number after the p would cause Windows Mobile to cease dialing. Spaces however were fine.

Now, lets see how long the service lasts before being swamped or shutdown!

What’s great about it though? It has a standard 3.5mm audio jack.

My last five phones have ranged from ‘ok’ to ‘good’ for playing music, but all have come with non-standard headphone jacks. Instead of being able to use your own headphones, you’re invariably stuck with the cheap effort bundled with your phone, or with having to buy (and not lose) an adaptor.

My T-Mobile MDA certainly has the capacity and software to be a great little music player for short, or even long, trips. But instead, I usually pack my Nano. Not only can I then use noise-canceling headphones if I’m flying, but I only have to pack one set of headphones.

Bravo Apple. Other phone vendors, take note.

Technology has moved on however and there are now Smartphone’s available that are the same size as regular models, and Pocket PC Phones only a little larger. The T-Mobile MDA is from the HTC Wizard family and weighs in at around 160g with dimensions of 108 x 58 x 24mm. This makes it a little larger than my K750, but smaller than most PDA’s on the market and a size that easily slips into a trouser pocket without creating a somewhat embarrassing bulge.

Overall I’m very pleased with the MDA. It’s slightly lower spec than you’d like as a PDA and not quite as usable as a regular phone for calls, but it truly is more than the sum of its parts. I love that courtesy of Outlook and ActiveSync I have my Email, Contacts, Calendar, Notes and Tasks with me at all times – while my K750 could also sync this information it was cumbersome to do anything other than view it. Both WiFi and EDGE/GPRS work well, I have an unlimited data plan on T-Mobile and having both options allows me to connect from virtually anywhere. I recently spent a week in Sedona, AZ where there’s little in the way of hotspots, but by connecting my laptop to the MDA allowed me to use the EDGE network with speeds varying from 15-25kbs. And of course being based on Windows Mobile there are a wealth of applications out there for all your needs; three of my favourites are Opera, Newsgator Mobile and Pocket Sudoku.

If you’re just looking for a fancy phone for messaging and calls this probably won’t be the phone for you, but if you want a phone that combines the functionality of a PDA and calls then the MDA is certainly worth checking out.