My 14-day return period with the T-Mobile MDA is just about up. I’m grudgingly going to keep it… I’d rather use the MDA as a data-only device but T-Mobile recently jacked their unlimited data-only plan from $30 to $50, and for my usage patterns I’m better off spending $10 more to bundle their cheapest voice plan.
Interestingly, the Sidekick and Blackberry data-only plans are still $30.
My biggest gripe with the MDA is that it is simply not suited for one-handed operation. Despite the Smartphone-esque changes in Windows Mobile 5 Phone Edition it is still very much a touch-oriented operating system. On a larger device this might be a non-issue but the MDA’s screen is frickin’ tiny and my fingers are too large to reliably tap most elements. I’ve re-mapped the Mail and IE hotkeys to Start and OK, making it much less annoying to use in Portrait mode, but their placement at the top of the screen is less than ideal and it’s still difficult to do much without eventually breaking out the retardedly-placed stylus.
I’d probably be much happier with a Treo 700w or the Smartphone-based, non-touchscreen, Motorola Q.
But what really makes the MDA suck as a phone is the dialing application. In Portrait mode the dialing keypad takes up maybe 1/3 of the screen. Did I mention that the screen is really tiny? My large fingers have a hard time dialing if I’m not fully concentrated on the task. If you are a “Drunk Dialer” this might be the perfect phone for you…
The phone app also suffers from not being keyboard-aware. Punch in 666 and it’ll bring up “Mom” (I love that :-)) but type in DAD and you’ll get nowhere.
And I really frickin’ hate that it takes MiniSD instead of regular SD. There’s just no good reason for that.
Just so that this isn’t a total bitch-fest… T-Mobile’s coverage in South Florida is the best and in my book their customer service reps rank right up there with Fidelity — a pleasure to deal with at all times. The MDA’s built-in WiFi is way faster than the add-in card from my old Pocket PC. For that matter, EDGE is faster too. My old Pocket PC really sucked. Pocket IE is a pretty decent browser. Mail works great.
And I love the wired stereo handsfree. My last several phones have included a stereo handsfree but I never actually used them — it seemed like a bad idea for car use and I never thought to try them elsewhere. When I’m not calling from my car I’m probably standing outdoors near traffic, a noisy environment to say the least. Having a little speaker in each ear really drowns out the background noise. I like it. Alot.
The good:
- EDGE
- WiFi
- Bluetooth
- Usable Keyboard
- Reasonably Priced
- Comparable in size to the Treo 6xx / 7xx
- Best voice quality I’ve experienced with my Jabra 250 Bluetooth headset
The bad:
- EDGE < EVDO / UMTS
- Battery life is mediocre, 50% after a day at work with zero usage
- Tiny screen is not thumbable
- Numerous crashes of tmail.exe and device.exe
- Sliding open the keyboard activates neither the display nor the keyboard backlight
- Keyboard backlight time-out is not adjustable
- No dedicated numeric keys
- Getting a Shift / Fn indicator requires registry hacking
- Shift / Fn indicator does not indicate lock / both
- Voice quality without a headset is mediocre
- Speakerphone isn’t loud enough
- Why MiniSD, Why?
The ugly:
- Phone Edition < Smartphone
- Some dumb-ass put the stylus on the bottom
- Phone app is teh sux
For the search engines: HTC Wizard, i-mate KJAM, Cingular 8100 / 8125.
Hey, Bryce,
I am guessing that you never actually spent a lot of time with a Treo 650? The reason I ask is (1) you dis the screen size of the MDA, and the (2) one-handedness.
I have spent the past year with a 650, and so I have a different take on both issues. Of course, I may be wrong, but I hope not–I am switching to a HTC Wizard later this week, I believe.
I have an old-school Treo 180. Half the people I work with have a Treo 600 or 650. Between the Treo’s 5-way, Home and Menu buttons it is pretty rare that you have to tap the screen. When you do need to tap something chances are that it will be finger-sized. And with the fixed keyboard on the front all of the keys you might need are always available.
The MDA has Start and OK buttons on the keyboard but they don’t do much good in Portrait mode. If you do not remap some of the top or side buttons to those functions then you’ll be doing a whole lot of tapping just to open and close things. And you’ll still be tapping for countless other things — changing mail folders, the Pocket IE location bar, and on and on.
On the screen size itself… The MDA’s 2.8″ screen has roughly 63% of the viewing area of the typical 3.5″ Pocket PC screen. Microsoft and developers have done nothing to account for such dramatic differences in screen size so everything on the MDA’s screen is tiny.
In the Palm OS world, everything got “pixel doubled” from 160×160 to 320×320 before the screens shrank. Relatively speaking, most Palm OS elements were large-ish on standard-sized screens due to the low DPI.
PS: I recognize that Palm OS and the Treo devices are not perfect. If I thought they were, I’d have purchased a 650 long ago.
I do think that the 700w represents a more usable form-factor than the MDA, 240×240 issues aside, and I cannot imagine that the MDA would be satisfactory to a 600/650 user. Unless Palm OS instability or Microsoft-exclusive features are the primary reasons for defecting…