T-Mobile MDA phone, first looks
Jul. 16th, 2006 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swehThe phone
I'd been looking at getting a mobile/PDA and decided on the T-Mobile MDA. It has a nice keyboard and the price was better than a Treo, and the T-Mobile plans are cheaper than Verizons. After some wibbling I took the plunge.
The pocketputty client only does 40x22 or 53x15 (depending on orientation). Not too good. Despite apparently being on EDGE (which is their fast 3G network) internet browsing is pretty slow; google seems to fail a lot. My regular web sites are almost unreadable with pocket-IE.
The mail program is adequate, but works best with Exchange (yes, it can pull from POP/IMAP, but it syncs better with Exchange). I'm testing with mail2web.com, and mails sent to that account will sync to my phone within a minute, but I don't really want _another_ email address (and they have broken DNS records, so outgoing mail is sometimes blocked by anti-spam and it took me a number of emails to convince their support desk that there _is_ a problem).
Only one type of network connection can be active at a time, it seems, so when I plug in the USB cable to sync to the PC (it needs Windows and Outlook) the EDGE/GPRS connection is dropped. This means that if I have an AIM client running it will eventually recognise it's not logged in and reconnect... but that leaves me now logged in twice (once over the now
dropped EDGE/GPRS and once over the USB connection - which NATs out, it seems, via the Windows PC). Annoying.
It's a Windows Mobile 5 devices, which isn't totally compatible with older Windows Mobile systems, so not all downloadable software will work. I'm still looking for a simple freeware database type program (so I can store my list of books/cds/videos on it).
The contacts list is in outlook mobile, and syncing to the PC puts it into Outlook. This makes it hard to get at from my Linux command line (I can read my current PDA backup files and extract the XML data so I can read the address book and display it from a command line).
It's not _all_ bad; I installed a few freeware programs, including a weather forecast program which displays the forecast for the next 4 days based on NOAA data (yeesh, Tuesday is meant to be 100F in NYC!), a few games, a semi-decent AIM client, and an extended calendar plugin for the "today" main screen.
Maybe I'm just expecting too much from this device. As a phone it's a little better than my old Motorola T720. As a PDA it's not as good (IMHO) as my Linux based Zaurus SL5500. As an internet access device it's slow and the screen is far too small to do anything useful with it.
I'm going to give it a trial for a few more days, but if it doesn't grow on me then I'll probably return it (within the 14 days trial period) for a refund. The extra monthly cost is looking a little high for such a little increase over what I've currently got.
I'd been looking at getting a mobile/PDA and decided on the T-Mobile MDA. It has a nice keyboard and the price was better than a Treo, and the T-Mobile plans are cheaper than Verizons. After some wibbling I took the plunge.
The pocketputty client only does 40x22 or 53x15 (depending on orientation). Not too good. Despite apparently being on EDGE (which is their fast 3G network) internet browsing is pretty slow; google seems to fail a lot. My regular web sites are almost unreadable with pocket-IE.
The mail program is adequate, but works best with Exchange (yes, it can pull from POP/IMAP, but it syncs better with Exchange). I'm testing with mail2web.com, and mails sent to that account will sync to my phone within a minute, but I don't really want _another_ email address (and they have broken DNS records, so outgoing mail is sometimes blocked by anti-spam and it took me a number of emails to convince their support desk that there _is_ a problem).
Only one type of network connection can be active at a time, it seems, so when I plug in the USB cable to sync to the PC (it needs Windows and Outlook) the EDGE/GPRS connection is dropped. This means that if I have an AIM client running it will eventually recognise it's not logged in and reconnect... but that leaves me now logged in twice (once over the now
dropped EDGE/GPRS and once over the USB connection - which NATs out, it seems, via the Windows PC). Annoying.
It's a Windows Mobile 5 devices, which isn't totally compatible with older Windows Mobile systems, so not all downloadable software will work. I'm still looking for a simple freeware database type program (so I can store my list of books/cds/videos on it).
The contacts list is in outlook mobile, and syncing to the PC puts it into Outlook. This makes it hard to get at from my Linux command line (I can read my current PDA backup files and extract the XML data so I can read the address book and display it from a command line).
It's not _all_ bad; I installed a few freeware programs, including a weather forecast program which displays the forecast for the next 4 days based on NOAA data (yeesh, Tuesday is meant to be 100F in NYC!), a few games, a semi-decent AIM client, and an extended calendar plugin for the "today" main screen.
Maybe I'm just expecting too much from this device. As a phone it's a little better than my old Motorola T720. As a PDA it's not as good (IMHO) as my Linux based Zaurus SL5500. As an internet access device it's slow and the screen is far too small to do anything useful with it.
I'm going to give it a trial for a few more days, but if it doesn't grow on me then I'll probably return it (within the 14 days trial period) for a refund. The extra monthly cost is looking a little high for such a little increase over what I've currently got.
