T-Mobile Wing Smartphone

I recently purchased the Tmobile Wing with Windows 6.0. This phone replaced my Tmobile Dash which I just upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.0 as well. I'll first talk about my impression with the Tmobile Wing then go on to compare the Wing vs other Tmobile PDA phones.

At first glance, the Wing is a thing of beauty. The color was a bit odd for me, but grows with you in time. The grip of the phone is excellent. It never felt as though I would drop it or scratch it in any way. The included screen protector was a great touch, but I did not use it as I am pretty careful with my phone screens. The one thing to note is that the screen is recessed into the body of the phone unlike the Tmobile Dash or Iphone... what this means is that dust and other dirt can collect into the edges and corners of the screen. This can't be avoided even if you use the screen protector. I spent a lot of time blowing out the dust in the corners only to find that it would accumulate more.

The bulk of the phone is similar to Cingular's 8525, but that's where the comparisons stop... Though they look alike and have similar features... the Wing has a better keypad in my opinion and the spring loaded mechanism for sliding the keyboard in and out was a plus. However, the most discouraging feature of the phone is that Tmobile decided to give it a 200mhz processor vs a 400mhz like the one found in the Cingular 8525. The issue here is that with Windows Mobile 6 - there is a lot going on with the OS and the fact that you only have 200mhz available... makes for a sluggish phone. I know that the task manager has been improved in the new OS to allow the user to close programs by clicking the X on the right of the window, but it does not make up for the lack in processing power. I loaded only a few apps on my phone and it had to be rebooted several times. I then had to overclock the phone just to get some performance enhancements, but that only last for so long... and who wants to hack their phone? It should be standard functionality.

As for the rest of the phone - the screen is nice and vibrant... the Camera is so/so - I never really like the whole Camera/phone thing anyways. The push mail was ok... it's not really push unless you have a Microsoft Exchange server that is setup to use Push mail. You can configure hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, etc... from the available options on the phone, but have to settle for send/receive type functionality - I believe I set mine to check every min or so... The internet browsing was ok - I found that many sites loaded slowly and if you had little memory left - my Wing would freeze up when loading a page. The memory issue is KEY as when you first bootup, the OS takes up a good amount of memory and leaves you with almost nothing. Also, you can expand your memory, but it's not SYSTEM memory... it only works for pictures, music, and programs you can install.

Dialing is a bit awkward on the keypad - I guess I really don't like touchscreens. My Dash was easier since it had a full QWERTY keyboard on it which didn't have to slide out either... sometimes I wanted to dial with one hand for ease of use, but if you don't like the touchscreen... you'd have to slide out the keyboard and then use two hands to hold and dial. It may be just me, but I found a few times when this was very annoying. Speakerphone quality is great - as is the overall OS. The Windows Mobile 6 OS is a great update and has a lot of functionality that would have been better suited for a faster processor, but since you have to wait for commands to execute it almost ruins the experience of the new OS.

Battery life, is a bit better since it's a 200mhz processor, but go wifi and you're battery will drain fairly fast - and yet, there really isn't any benefit to internet browsing since the wifi connection is faster, but yet again the 200mhz processor does you in.

Another thing I realized is that when you receive mail and open the message and download all the data from the message - the next time your phone sends/receives... the message is removed - it still stays on the mail server, but is gone from your Wing. I hated this feature... it forced me to save a lot of message I wanted to retain on my Wing in a separate folder... thus taking up more room.

Overall, I would recommend the Wing to users of the Sidekick... though the Sidekick is a lot better performer as it is geared for multimedia and texting. As for business use or even grown up use... the Wing isn't all it's cracked up to be. This is why I only kept it for about two weeks then traded to the Blackberry 8800 with built in GPS. This is a great phone, but we'll save that for another discussion.

I'd give it a 5/10 - good design, poor processor speed, nice attempt from Tmobile to enhance their Windows Mobile offerings, but they need to up the hardware specs a bit to compete with the Blackberry's, iPhones, and Cingular 8525.