Pros & Cons
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- Wi-Fi.
- Excellent keyboard.
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- Poor phone performance.
T-Mobile MDA Specs
| Screen Size | 2.8 |
A
The MDA is a rounded handheld with a slide-out keyboard, much like the
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
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,
Like so many other PDA/phones, the T-Mobile MDA doesn't look good when compared with the easy-to-use
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
More PC Magazine cell phone reviews:
Final Thoughts
T-Mobile MDA
Check out this PDA-phone if the Sidekick seems too childish, but we're cool to its lackluster phone performance.