$209.95

Description

If three times is a charm, then the HTC Wizard, otherwise known as the T-Mobile MDA, T-Mobile MDA Vario, Cingular 8125, i-mate K-JAM, QTEK 9100 and the Dopod 838 must be imbued with magic. T-Mobile's MDA (not to be confused with its nearly identical twin the MDA Vario which has been out for several months on T-Mobile Europe) is yet another iteration of the incredibly successful and popular Wizard design from the prolific Taiwanese original device manufacturer HTC. Out in Feb. 2006 in the US, the MDA competes directly with the Cingular 8125 and the HTC Apache (the CDMA interpretation of the Wizard) sold as the Verizon XV6700 and Sprint PPC-6700. The good news is that this is a great PDA and phone, though the downside is you have less Pocket PC phone choice since every carrier is going with a version of this device as a top-tier offering. Perhaps this puts the focus on the carrier and your decision may be based more heavily on the carrier's strength and pricing in your area. Though there are minor carrier customizations (mostly software) that make for small differences too. For example, the Cingular 8125 comes with a Java VM while the MDA does not, and the MDA has much faster graphics than the i-mate K-JAM.

For T-Mobile, whose PDA and smartphone offers have trickled out slowly in the US, the MDA is an important move forward. Since the inception of Pocket PC Phone Edition, they've offered only the original T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone (original XDA) and the tepidly received HP iPAQ 6315. The MDA is a compact, reliable and feature-packed device that moves T-Mobile US squarely into the 21st century. Combine the web browsing and email prowess of the MDA with T-Mobile's recently rolled out 2.5G EDGE data network and you've got a strong business contender. The MDA has Bluetooth, WiFi, the afore mentioned EDGE, a thumb keyboard, a 1.3MP camera and runs Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone Edition.

Features

• Display: 2.8" transflective QVGA display capable of displaying 65K colors. Supports both portrait and landscape modes.
• Performance: Texas Instruments OMAP850 processor. 64 MB built-in RAM (~25 megs free). 128 MB Flash ROM with ~40 megs available for your use.
• Phone: GSM quad band world phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz bands) with GPRS and EDGE class 10 for data. Phone is sold locked to Cingular.
• Camera: 1.3MP CMOS camera with LED flash. Can take still photos (JPG and BMP) and videos with audio (MPEG4 and Motion-JPEG AVI). Photo Resolutions: 1600 x 1280, 1280 x 1024, 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120. Video resolutions: 176 x 144 and 128 x 96. Presets for taking photos, video, MMS, caller ID photos, sports and burst mode.
• Networking: Integrated WiFi 802.11b (and g) and Bluetooth 1.2.
• Software: Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition operating system. Microsoft Mobile Office suite including Mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint (view only), Internet Explorer, and Outlook. Also, Terminal Services, MSN Instant Messenger for Pocket PC, Windows Media Player 10, Solitaire, Bubble Breaker (game), Voice Recorder as well as handwriting recognition. Additional applications: Camera, Wireless Manager, T-Mobile's push email service (requires account), Wireless Modem (use the phone as a modem over BT, IR or USB), Clear Storage (wipes out all data and resets unit to factory defaults). ActiveSync 4.1 and Outlook 2002 for PCs included.

Review:
A Sidekick for grownups, the T-Mobile MDA ($399 list, available February 20) handles e-mail and Web browsing over Wi-Fi or EDGE with aplomb. Unfortunately, its lackluster phone performance and the stiff competition from other keyboard smartphones will limit its success.

The MDA is a rounded handheld with a slide-out keyboard, much like the Sprint PPC-6700—but smaller, lighter, and with better-separated keys. Dedicated buttons let you hit e-mail, Internet Explorer, your contacts, the camera, and the networking manager with one touch.


E-mail and text-messaging are a breeze with the snappy keyboard, though you can't really use the device one-handed. Turn the phone on with the keyboard closed, and you're running Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 on a 320-by-240 touchscreen. Slide the keyboard out, and the screen automatically rotates in response.

In addition to the Windows Mobile 5.0 pocket Office applications, which let you read and edit the most common forms of e-mail attachments, the handheld comes equipped with Clearvue's PDF reader. Microsoft Pocket Outlook supports POP3/IMAP, Exchange, and text-messaging accounts right now, and a free upgrade will add push e-mail from Exchange servers later this year. After adding a few programs, we had 20MB of free storage memory and 23MB of free program memory—plenty for everyday use.

Web surfing, either over Wi-Fi or T-Mobile's nationwide EDGE network, works well with Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer. If you don't like IE, Opera now has an alternative browser for Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PCs.

Configuring Wi-Fi is a little frustrating, requiring clicking some nonobvious menus and dialog boxes, so we were glad that T-Mobile has a special application to help you easily log into its 7,365 U.S. hot spots. The built-in app hooked us up in two clicks. If you can deal with the configuration screens, you can also connect to any other hot spot.

When you're not in Wi-Fi range, the MDA works with T-Mobile's EDGE network. Using our MDA with a USB cable as an EDGE modem for a laptop, we got excellent Class 10 EDGE speeds of 140 to 189 Kbps. (You can also hook the MDA up as a modem over Bluetooth.)

Alas, the MDA isn't as good a phone as it is an e-mail device. It has quad-band support, so it can roam across the U.S. and the world, but we found reception only so-so. It was usually a bar or two behind the T-Mobile's SDA. In addition, the earpiece was so quiet we had trouble making out the other end of a conversation in a noisy environment. The speakerphone was a touch better.

A Bluetooth or wired headset at least fixed the earpiece problem, and you'd probably use a headset anyway—devices like this aren't all that comfortable to hold up to your ear. We paired the MDA with Jabra, Plantronics, and Logitech Bluetooth headsets, and ActiveSynced via Bluetooth with a Dell laptop.

Battery life in PDA mode was middling, at almost 5 hours of video playback with the backlight turned way up. That dropped to under 3 hours with Wi-Fi turned on. Phone talk time was good if not excellent for a Pocket PC, at 9 hours 37 minutes.

The built-in 1.3-megapixel camera—with the typical weak flash—is better than the SDA's. Our test shots were bright and had good color, though they were blurry at the edges and slightly over-sharpened in the middle. The camera will be fine for snapshots, though. Videos, as usual, are 176-by-144 at 10 frames per second.

The 195-MHz processor doesn't have a problem with basic Web tasks or with music synced via Windows Media Player 10. It can even handle full-screen video synced via WMP 10, albeit at reduced rates of 10 to 15 frames per second. On SPB Benchmark test suite, the MDA did surprisingly well on graphics, but scored very poorly on CPU and file system tests; the one processor-heavy application we tried, Skype, failed miserably.

Like so many other PDA/phones, the T-Mobile MDA doesn't look good when compared with the easy-to-use Palm Treo 650 and the powerful Sprint PPC-6700. The Treo is a better phone that gives an unmatched one-handed experience, though it lacks Wi-Fi. The PPC-6700, meanwhile, blends Wi-Fi with high-speed, wide-area EV-DO for an unparalleled one-two punch of Internet power. The MDA isn't a bad PDA/phone, it just isn't the best.

Compare the phones mentioned above side by side.
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time (Wi-Fi off): 8 hours 31 minutes
Battery life (video playback, Wi-Fi off): 4 hours 54 minutes
Battery life (video playback, Wi-Fi on): 2 hours 53 minutes
SPB Benchmark: 255
CPU index: 945
File system index: 105
Graphics index: 2905

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