T-Mobile Wing with WM6 Professional
From pocketnow.com
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Introduction
Today T-Mobile USA has announced the successor to their successful MDA Pocket PC Phone with a slide-out keyboard. The T-Mobile Wing brings a few very welcome improvements as well as the bragging rights for being the first Windows Mobile 6 Professional device available in North America. As you may have heard, T-Mobile already released the first Windows Mobile 6 Standard device as a ROM upgrade to their popular Dash smartphone. Kudos go to T-Mobile for being the first to support the new operating system.
Review Date: May 22, 2007
Picture Highlights
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| The sliding keyboard has large buttons that are very easy to use. There are also two soft keys at the top underneath the screen. On the MDA, these buttons were spaced out more. While here they're closer to the screen positions they represent, they're smaller and more difficult to find and press with your thumbs without looking at the keyboard. | T-Mobile has included a number of memory-resident programs and today screen plug-ins. At the top is "TMO ONS" which shows the network name, date, and WiFi/Bluetooth status. This is a pretty nice replacement to the date Today Screen item. Next you have the "MyFaves" plug-in. |
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| The MyFaves application is a cute animated program that lets you quickly call any of your favorite people. | The included Adobe Reader LE 2 lets you open PDF documents either in your file system or received through email. The performance on this version of Adobe Reader has been greatly improved over the first version. |
Overall Impression
While the technical specifications for the T-Mobile Wing are not much different than the old T-Mobile MDA that it replaces, you really can't get any other Windows Mobile 6 Professional device in North America today. Though the new thinness and great build quality are very welcome improvements, really the Wing is all about being the first with Windows Mobile 6 Pro. If you're concerned that it doesn't have 3G internet, well guess what... neither does T-Mobile. They're still working on it and only testing it in a small number of Cities. So if you're outside of those Cities, you're not going to know what you're missing anyway. Even Cingular/AT&T doesn't have a very widespread UMTS network in place in North America yet, so it's not much of an issue.
If you're drawn to T-Mobile's new "MyFaves" rate plans, the Wing supports this fully and beautifully. I wish it would still support the Email Triggers feature for selective push email (i.e. only people you like get emails pushed), but all good things must come to an end. The new Windows Live features such as push Hotmail, Instant messenger with voice clips, and Live Search are sure to be enticing for consumers.
At first I was a bit turned off by the blue coloring, but it has since grown on me. Everyone has black or grey phones, the dark blue is quite a refreshing change. And I can't get enough of the "soft touch" skin covering the device. That combined with the excellent build quality is sure to make the Wing very popular with T-Mobile's Windows Mobile fans.
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