The T-Mobile MDA Smartphone: I Wanted a Personal Assistant. I Got a Nightmare.
Written: Aug 20 '06 (Updated Nov 14 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good construction, good sound quality, a head-turner
Cons: I just . . .can't . . .TAKE IT ANYMORE!
The Bottom Line: I should have bought a flip phone and a laptop.
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| meagandowney's Full Review: T-Mobile MDA Smartphone |
I Was the Canary in T-Mobile’s Coal Mine
I began researching Blackberries a few months ago after my little Nokia phone started to fade. I was either going to have to continue to suffer through screaming “I’M SORRY. CAN YOU PLEASE REPEAT THAT?” as the El or some ambulance went whirring by, or I was going to get a handheld device that would allow me to hear the caller on the other end of the line and do all kinds of things – like reply to emails, Google directions, and find phone numbers without tracking down staff to do it for me.
I soon discovered that while Blackberries are great for email, they’re not a good tool for surfing the web. Furthermore, Blackberries “push” emails from your company’s dedicated Blackberry server directly to your handheld. If you don’t have a dedicated server, it doesn’t make any sense to get a Blackberry. As my company’s web master, IT person and a slough of other things that somehow got written into my job description, I knew I didn’t want to have to deal with that for one lonely handheld device. So Blackberries were out.
Unfortunately, my purchasing decision was made right before the advent of the Q, the Treo and several other products. I was locked into what T-Mobile had available at the time, and had no interest in the Sidekick. It might have been fun to be Paris Hilton for a day, but I was pretty sure that our handheld needs were quite different. I wanted something professional without being stuffy. I wanted something that would allow me to do many of the things I could do with a laptop without worrying about spilling coffee and kissing $2,000 good-bye. I wanted to be able to read a .pdf or plug a formula into an Excel spreadsheet on the go, and I wanted reliable internet access.
My T-Mobile Representative Loves His New MDA Smartphone
After explaining my needs to a T-Mobile representative, he swore that what I wanted was the T-Mobile MDA Smartphone. He said that he personally owned one and that his life had changed dramatically after purchasing it. The internet access was incredibly fast and the sound was clear. He had no trouble checking his POP email and it even doubled as an iPod. This all seemed too good to be true and it was, but I’m a sucker for ecstatic consumer reviews so I convinced my boss to spend the $400 on the device.
I wish I’d written down the name of that representative, because I’d love to email him my thoughts from my MDA. His email would probably arrive in duplicate and sans punctuation. It would read a little something like this:
Dear Sir
Im very disadisappointed with
the
MDA Smartphone Why are you telling ep people
to buy these
things when they suck so bad You
got me all excitexcited for nothing I dont
feel very professprofessional when I use this to send emails Id like
to draft this letter to you
in MicroMicrosoft Word but Im afraid I wont have any
memory left Im SUCH A SUCKER UHOH MY CAPS LOCK TURNED ITSELF ON AGAIN AND IT WONT TURN OFF THANKS A FREAKING LOT
MEAGAN DOWNEY A K A SUCKER
Things weren’t always this way. When my MDA Smartphone first arrived, I had dreams of increased productivity, a Bluetooth headset, and the real version of Blondie’s “Call Me” playing when my boyfriend called. It only took a few phone calls and the first failed attempt to synch the device with my computer for the buyer’s remorse to kick in.
Specifications
The specs are available in table format here.
The MDA Smartphone is rectangular in shape and thick in your hand. The dimensions are 4.2 x 2.3 x 0.9 inches. It’s much heavier than many handheld devices (5.6 ounces) because of the QWERTY keyboard that slides out from underneath the screen. It comes with a sliver of rubberized plastic to keep the phone from slipping, but I wish this sliver was a little bigger. The stopper is less effective now than it was when I first purchased the MDA two months ago.
The phone itself is a quad-band phone that is equipped for Bluetooth and a miniSD slot for adding memory to its meager 128 MB of RAM. It’s also equipped to support EDGE high speed data, and features a 1.3 megapixel camera on the underside of the keyboard. The camera menus are NOT intuitive, and the quality is just so-so. Good luck sending picture messages to friends and family. I’ve still not been able to do that successfully with my MDA.
The 240x320 LCD screen is very clear and bright. I’ve had some trouble in bright sunlight, but screen brightness can be adjusted by selecting the Backlight icon in the System Settings menu. The colors are very vivid, and the touch screen seems to have just the right amount of sensitivity. The phone comes with three styluses to use with the touch screen, but it is possible to use your fingers in a pinch. I do have a few complaints about the set up of some of the applications which has led to frustration with the touch screen, but I’ll get to those later.
The silver and black construction feels very durable. I’ve dropped my MDA at least 2 or 3 times on concrete and it hasn’t fallen apart or even gotten scratched. The fact that my MDA has not been scratched says a lot about the construction because I never carry it in the little black hip-clip case that came with it. It usually floats around in my overstuffed bag or purse.
The MDA features programmable buttons. Most of these are very intuitive. There’s a picture of a little camera on the shutter button for the camera, a talking bubble for voice dialing, etc. The phone also features an on/off button that is small enough to not be inadvertently depressed while on the go, and larger buttons on the face of the unit for beginning and ending calls, sending email and accessing the internet. I’m particularly happy about the Talk/End Call buttons because the phone touch screen interface is a hassle to use when making calls.
The phone comes with Windows Mobile 5.0 installed, which includes most of the Microsoft Office Suite. You get Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, as well as ClearVue PDF for reading .pdf documents. For media, there’s Windows Media Player and a mobile version of Microsoft Picture Manager. The “Today” screen (or Desktop) is very similar to Outlook’s welcome screen, which gives you easy access to your calendar, tasks, email and contacts. Games include Bubble Breaker and Solitaire. Utilities include Calculator and a program akin to WinZip.
The phone has a lithium-ion battery that usually lasts me two days of very light use or one day of heavy internet surfing and talking. Taking the phone off vibrate and turning the backlight down saves some battery, but once your battery is running low you don’t get much time to charge it at all. I have been very annoyed by the fact that if I have a very busy, mobile work day and I forget to charge this at night, it will barely last me through the next morning even if I turn off the ringer and turn down the backlight. The charger does connect snugly to the phone, and has not been susceptible to forming little dust bunnies on the metal connectors as has happened with some Motorola phones.
The screen can get a little gross and sweaty after a long telephone conversation, but I’m not nearly as worried about damaging the LCD screen as I thought I would be. I’ve carried this in the rain (sprinkling, not pouring) several times without any trouble. I simply wipe the droplets off the screen, being careful not to accidentally set off a bunch of unfamiliar settings on the touch screen.
I like the fact that the QWERTY keyboard triggers the screen layout to change from portrait to landscape as appropriate and that it has a blue backlight that allows you to compose messages or dial numbers in the dark. It’s also very easy to type letters quickly, but numbers are a pain because they are secondary symbols. I don’t like the fact that all of the buttons are doubled up and that you have to get used to using a function key to access the secondary symbols (like all of the numbers, quotes, @ signs, ampersands, etc.). I really, really, really don’t like the fact that the keyboard doesn’t feature the greater than/less than signs required for even the most basic HTML coding. I suppose that the majority of consumers won’t be doing much HTML coding with this device, but I do so it bugs me.
All applications that use text (Microsoft Word, web-based forms, etc.) use an autocomplete feature that remembers words you’ve used in the past. This feature is mediocre at best. It often suggests words I’m not trying to type. I suppose that there’s a chance that there will be a cumulative positive effect over time, but I’m not benefiting from the autocomplete feature at this juncture.
If you’re a little phobic about the keyboard, you have the option of using the stylus to punch in your message off of a miniscule representation of the keyboard on your screen. I don’t recommend relying on this feature for very long though, unless you are a microscope.
Performance
I don’t want to delve too deeply into a review of Windows Mobile 5.0 or of ActiveSynch because the software performance isn’t necessarily indicative of the hardware’s performance, but since you have no other software options for the device that I’m aware of, let me just say that there are a lot of kinks in the software. Even though I’m very familiar with working in a Windows-based operating environment, Windows Mobile 5.0 has several annoying quirks, such as never actually closing programs (forcing you to end the programs manually from a separate Running Programs menu) and a myriad of other application-specific bugs.
Windows Media Player speeds up songs, and Internet Explorer hobbles around on the web. Browsing the web with this device is difficult not only because most websites are developed with the desktop user in mind, but also because the connection often gets lost, especially when I’m riding public transportation. When this happens, Internet Explorer doesn’t “understand” that the connection has been lost and I have to manually cancel out the connection, wait a full 5 minutes or so and try to reconnect again. I use the GPRS connection, but you also have the option to use T-Mobile Hot Spot Wireless internet connections or setting this up to connect with an exchange server.
Google, Yahoo, T-Mobile and other large sites can identify that you are accessing the page from your handheld, so you can easily set up a Favorites list that contains PDA-friendly pages, but sometimes you’ll just be forced to wait until you get to your desktop to get links to work. I’ve had a lot of trouble with buttons and items using JavaScript. I would never, ever try to buy something online with my MDA because there have been too many cases in which the button I’ve pressed sends the information twice. After using a button, the device takes way too long to reload the page and sometimes causes me to hit the wrong button if I’ve double clicked with my stylus. If it caught my second click mid-refresh, it may read that I’ve clicked a button that never even appeared on my screen.
When I first started using my MDA to browse the internet, I wondered if adding memory would help to boost speed and performance. I spent $50 on an additional 256 MB of RAM, and it was almost a total waste of money. I have to tell programs to save data to the memory card as opposed to the “hard drive” and the applications don’t seem to use the expanded memory to run even when hard drive memory is low. It’s a little like having a 256 MB floppy drive for extra data. That $50 did nothing more and nothing less for the MDA.
I clean the internet cache regularly, and the internet seems to run a little better after doing that and manually closing out all of the programs that continue to run in the background even if you’ve only opened them accidentally. I don’t know if subscribing to the wireless service would help at all, but please feel free to comment here if wireless has made a big difference for you. I didn’t want to spend any more than the $19.99 I’m paying monthly for my GPRS connection.
Believe it or not, I never use my MDA for work email, even though some emails with attachments came through o.k. I was able to set my MDA up to receive email but for some reason, it only sends particular types of emails and doesn’t keep a copy of the email on my server. This frightened me enough to give up on using it for email entirely. I'll use it for Yahoo, but not for work.
Oh, and It’s Also a Phone
The best way to initiate or end a call is by using the buttons on the face of the phone. The best way to dial a number with one hand is to let your fingernails grow really, really long and then sharpen them into little points that resemble the end of a stylus. If stylus-like fingernails aren’t up your alley, I’m afraid that you’re going to have to suffer through the maddening keyboard and/or touch screen. Using the keyboard means that you have to hit the function key before hitting every number, unless you want to risk keeping the function setting on and not being able to turn it off again. Using the touch screen means that you will make lots of mistakes and misdials because the buttons are just big enough to tempt your fingers and just small enough to make you hit two or three numbers at once.
On the upside, the sound quality is o.k., but it’s very difficult to cradle this phone. If you’re used to a flip phone, you’ll hate the MDA’s boxy, heavy feel. The headphones that came with my phone are terrific, and I suggest you use headphones or a head set whenever possible. I’ve never tried to synch this with a Bluetooth headset, but was able to synch it with another Bluetooth device so I’m sure you’d have no trouble with a wireless headset. Speaker volume is also o.k., but not outstanding. The maximum volume isn’t really as loud as I’d prefer and I can never quite tell how to hold the phone to get the loudest volume.
The call history feature can hold many, many numbers and detailed profiles can be created for each caller. I highly recommend setting up your contact profiles on your PC and updating the MDA though, because it’s a pain in the neck to associate images, ring tones and multiple numbers to callers. You could feasibly associate everything including a person’s social security number to their profile on your smartphone, but why?
I loathe the fact that the MDA assumes that the primary number of a contact is their work number, because I still have some semblance of a family life and a social life. I also loathe the fact that the MDA imports lone email addresses without contact information into my call contacts because I used to have a setting in Outlook Express that automatically put emails into my contact list which means that I have a ridiculous number of email addresses posing as call contacts, even after cleaning up my contacts list. I can't wipe these addesses from my desktop because I still use them but since I don't conduct business via email on my MDA, they're useless. I could manually erase them, but they'd just reappear the next time I synch the device with my computer.
When someone calls and leaves a voice message or text messages you, a little notification appears on your Today screen. It’s difficult to dismiss some notifications entirely. The unit has a green light, a blue light and an orange light. As I write this review, all three lights are flashing intermittently and I have no idea why. It could be because a notification was never dismissed. It could be because I have an unread text message. It could be just because the sky is blue. I don’t understand it and I’m just so tired of trying to understand it.
My Kingdom For Software That Will Synch This Smartphone With My PC
I had the most frustrating time trying to synch the MDA to my PC. The CD that came with my MDA did not contain the most up-to-date version of ActiveSync (the application that allows you to synch the handheld) and so I had to watch a little green circle pulsate on my screen for eons before finally giving up, removing the program and reinstalling. Once the same thing happened again, I visited the website and downloaded the most recent version of ActiveSynch (4.1). This was in early July. Again with the green pulsating circle.
After reading the troubleshooting information on the Microsoft website, I thought that the problem might have been that I’d been using Outlook Express instead of Outlook. So, I backed up all of my emails and contacts and imported them to Outlook (which is a relatively complicated feat for beginning users). I also exported my web-based calendar to Outlook and figured my way around the application. This was not necessarily a bad thing, because I do like using Outlook better than Outlook Express for a multitude of reasons, but without a server on site at the office and Outlook Exchange, staff members now can’t access my calendar and I can’t add them to appointments.
When Active Synch 4.1 didn’t work after another reinstallation (this was after going through the trouble of programming my anti-virus software to allow ActiveSynch activity on my computer) following the upgrade to Outlook, I truly thought all was lost. I thought that perhaps I needed Exchange in order to use ActiveSynch. I then waited another few weeks to let my temper subside before making the inevitable call to T-Mobile’s MDA technical support line, which can be accessed by calling 1-800-TMOBILE and using the voice prompt “MDA” to be transferred directly to an MDA support specialist.
By the time that phone call was made, I discovered that yet another version of ActiveSynch had been released (4.2) and I am happy to report that it finally worked. I successfully synched my MDA to my work PC. Unfortunately, the synch forced me to have to clean up all of my contacts and I STILL have to walk around with hundreds of contacts in my phone. I miss my simpler contact list and I wish that the few songs I attempted to download to my MDA would play without bringing back memories of watching The Chipmunks.
ActiveSynch gives you very little control over what information you export to your MDA and you have to use similar applications on your PC in order to export with any degree of success.
The USB cord does charge your MDA by using power from your PC, which is nice if you don’t want to buy an extra charger. I recommend buying an extra USB cord, however, because mine is already MIA somewhere during the journey between work and home. I have yet to synch this with my home computer because I really do not want to have to use Outlook at home. It’s just unthinkable.
What They Say
The new T-Mobile MDA is a messaging powerhouse, with a full keyboard that slides away plus GSM, GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, and the extra speed you need to take advantage of the T-Mobile Total Internet network.
Overall
Sigh. This review was very tedious to write, even while drinking, because this MDA has really caused a lot of headaches that I never anticipated. I can’t use it for music. It comes with a handful of stupid ringtones and the only way to import new ringtones is to synch it with your PC. This was an incredible hassle that forced me to upgrade my entire email management software at work and even when I finally synched it, the music it did play sounded like it had been recorded by The Chipmunks (which isn’t that bad when it’s Beck, by the way).
Overall, I’m giving the T-Mobile MDA Smartphone two stars because it does have some redeeming qualities. The construction is durable and the screen is easy to read, but the web access, ergonomics, touch screen, camera resolution, and other features have really let me down. I expected something to last me until I really wanted to move into using a laptop, but my expectations were way too high. This is a buggy alternative to the Treo that I was duped into buying.
Avoid it. There's a reason why the price has dropped by a full $150 in the past two months. People have started using it.
Update
While I am still disappointed with my purchase after several more months of ownership, I will say that hitting the signal icon that appears on the top right hand of the screen and then navigating through the network menu to reregister on the network has helped at times, as has holding the on/off button for several seconds in order to completely reset the device. Usually, these workarounds take up just enough time to keep me frustrated and not productive, but they are workarounds just the same.
Motorola V330 Cellular Phone
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 400
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meagandowney
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Member: Meagan Downey
Location: Chicago, IL
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