T-Mobile MDA–Impressions after 2 1/2 weeks
Originally posted 2006-03-11 03:40:47
The day the MDA came out, Feb 21, I went to a T-Mobile store and bought one. The next day, a coworker who has a Windows Phone/PDA from yesteryear, couldn’t stand himself and bought one, too. The day after that, another coworker, who has gone staunchly PDA-less his entire life, caved in and bought one, too. He had some problems–he called around the city to all the T-Mobile stores, and they were all out. He finally found one, though. So, all three technology directors at our company carry one of these devices. Our boss, the CTO, carries a Treo 650 and envies us.
We use Pylon Anywhere to sync with the Exchange server, and that works really well. I can sync over USB, Wi-Fi, or GPRS, and it works great. Having my work inbox available from anywhere is already making a difference in my day-to-day work. I also have set up my personal email, but that’s less effective because I get so much spam, and whereas Apple’s Mail app weeds out a lot of the junk, the MDA brings it all down. The Outlook mail stays segregated from the personal mail, though, and I can check accounts independently, so I usually leave the personal email unchecked.
The calendar works just as expected. One annoyance: on the Palm, I could set the time for an alarm for an all-day event. On the MDA, the alarm for an all-day event goes off at 11:55 PM the night before. I can’t figure out how to change this, so I have to make sure to turn off any alarms on all-day events so I’m not disturbed in the middle of the night.
I’m surprised at how often the \”sleep cursor\” displays when launching new applications. Once launched, things seem to run at a snappy pace, but launching takes much longer than on my Palm device.
The slide out thumboard works well. Typing long emails is a pain, but still doable–much better than using Graffiti or an onscreen keyboard.
I’ve heard you can do VPN with this device, but I haven’t learned how, yet. It would be cool to be able to VPN in to the corporate network and SSH to the servers. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that Windows Mobile software seems expensive. I found an SSH client for $80–ouch! I haven’t yet tried PocketPuTTY–not sure if it even works on Windows Mobile 5.0 (which is what the MDA runs)–and \”pre-alpha\” scares me, but I’ll probably give it a go. I have bought one program so far–Sudoku Master–but I’m not sure yet what other programs I’ll find valuable/essential. I miss Passwords Plus, and although similar products exist for Windows Mobile, I would face the daunting task of importing my existing password entries.
The MDA has a \”chat bubble\” icon that appears if I have any missed alerts. Unfortunately, if you stay logged on to Yahoo instant messaging, that icon stays visible, so you have to tap on it periodically to see if you have any outstanding alerts. The IM works great, though.
This is the first phone or PDA I’ve owned with a built-in camera. I didn’t have high hopes for the camera, and those hopes were matched. It works great for taking a quick snapshot to email (which I’ve done a few times already to send to my parents in Australia), but you wouldn’t want to keep the pictures this camera takes for anything meaningful.
Overall, I’m pleased with the device, and am glad I bought it. I’m burning the ships and giving my Palm to my younger brother, so there’s no turning back. My next steps are to figure out how I can develop software for it (my latest version of Visual Studio is version 6, and I don’t plan to buy any newer versions, maybe I’m out of luck), to get VPN , VNC, and SSH working, and to find any other must-have software for this thing. Oh, and to change my ring tone 🙂
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