Is it comparable, better, or worse in your experience.

For which HTC Phone Edition device? There are a lot of them to choose from.

The cingular 8125

I had the SMT5600 and I just bought a 8125. In my house(where I can get a good baseline) the Cingular 8125 seems to get much better connections. The 5600 wouldnt necessarily drop calls but the call wouldnt be smooth through out. So far the 8125 seems to have better continuous call quality.

I have to agree with jaward... In any of the "marginal" locations around my home area, the 8125 has much stronger signal (more bars) than my SMT used to have. I would be able to make a call on the SMT with one bar... but my general reception appears better overall on the 8125....

Call quality?? I would say they are comparable in my opinion... I use the same Jabra 250BT headset for both, so it's probably why they sound the same to me..

I think the phone has better reception as well, if only for the Edge support. We have a blend of SmartPhanes in our company and when I'm standing next to a person with an SMT5600 or an iMate there are many places where I will get a full strength Edge signal and they'll be searching.

It comes and goes at my house still. The 5600 I had and the 8125 have similar reception out in the sticks where there is no Edge.

When you are near a lot of Edge towers and you use GPRS, it can be really fast for data.

Our building has a Cingular tower on top of it, but of course we get crappy signals because we're basically in its shadow.

One missing feature is the ability to manually select a network. At least, I can't always get the choice (I've seen it pop up once in a while, but I haven't figured out the magic handshake). My parents live in a place where there is a really faint old AT&T tower (1900MHz) and a strong Cingular tower (850MHz... different bands... I know because my MPx200 couldn't get on the Cingular tower). On my parents' free phones, I can set their tower affinity manually, and I used to do it with my SMT5600. But my reception is crappy up there because I can't pick the proper tower manually. So it is contstantly hunting for a signal and doesn't bother sticking with the strongest one it finds.

Also, Cingular went and renamed the AT&T tower now so picking the right tower is a process of total trial and error. I don't know the order in which the towers are presented and can't be sure of which tower I was associated to in the first place! :-(

But, the 8125 is over all a much better phone for reception.
TTFN