T-Mobile MDA Vario

...is bright and crisp and T-mobile bundle a stick-on screen protector, which I have since removed because it dims the screen a bit and is slightly too small, leaving a margin that your stylus gets stuck in. I carry the phone in my pocket all day and it has not got a scratch on it, which I cannot explain but find delightful.

The main reasons I use it are for e-mail on the go, Bluetooth (so it can talk to my satellite receiver in the ...
...scheme and the hideous pink T-mobile logo printed on the web browser button, you can uninstall them and scratch them off, respectively, with ease.

A word about the 1.3 mega-pixel camera: it is *terrible*. I don't even bother with mine, once I'd finished playing with it. The quality of pictures is woeful, the shutter is slow, and the video-recording is a mere gesture (as though they were scared to leave it out). You might decide it ... more

This phone is made by HTC and is actually a "Wizard". It is called "MDA Vario" by T-mobile, but it's branded differently by other providers, e.g. "Qtek 9100", "i-Mate K-JAM", "Orange SPV M6000", "O2 XDA Pro Mini".

It comes with a carrying case, USB cable, charger, a spare stylus, stereo hands-free earphones, a decent manual, ActiveSync and Outlook.

I chose it because it is a combined PDA and phone, based on Microsoft "Windows Mobile 5" (Pocket PC) operating system. The processor in this phone runs at a slower clock speed than similar Windows Mobile phones that have preceded it, but the architecture and the new operating system should make this fact unnoticeable most of the time, while providing better battery life.

I've actually found the battery life to be adequate and no more. I can reliably drain the battery by the end of the day if I use the phone a lot (especially using it to run satellite navigation software for a couple of journeys - but, to be fair, this does involve having the backlight on constantly, the loudspeaker volume up loud and the Bluetooth in constant use). If you're plugging the phone in to sync with USB at the end of every day, you won't even notice this battery life, as it will charge at the same time. The screen is bright and crisp and T-mobile bundle a stick-on screen protector, which I have since removed because it dims the screen a bit and is slightly too small, leaving a margin that your stylus gets stuck in. I carry the phone in my pocket all day and it has not got a scratch on it, which I cannot explain but find delightful.

The main reasons I use it are for e-mail on the go, Bluetooth (so it can talk to my satellite receiver in the car), occasional web use and for text messaging. The build in, slide-out keyboard makes it an ideal communications tool, as you can thumb messages in a reasonable speed and the keyboard slides totally out of sight when not in use. Lots of phones have flip-down or slide-out keyboards these days - the novelty here is that the keyboard uses the full height of the phone for the keyboard's width and the screen rotates 90 degrees into 'landscape' mode when you slide it out, giving a more spacious keyboard than is possible on other models. To hold my navigation maps and other software I use a 512MB Mini-SD card that I bought from elsewhere, but this is by no means a necessary accessory unless you're planning on using a lot of software (or music, or videos) on the phone.

Now, all that internet use would cost a bomb with most mobile providers' tariffs (the charges for data use are astronomical compared to home internet connections). However, with T-mobile's 'Web 'n' Walk' tariff you get 40MB of data included each month. The number of 'talk' minutes depends on the particular plan chosen. I find 40MB is adequate for reading a few pages on the Web each day to catch up with the news, and to check my e-mail every few minutes, 24 x 7. The built-in WiFi (802.11) networking is an awesome feature to have and can save you having to use GRPS a lot of the time.

The applications bundled with Windows Mobile are adequate for basic use, but there are high-powered alternatives from third parties, such as Opera's newly-released Pocket PC web browser (www.opera.com), e-mail clients, calendar applications, RSS readers, etc. Most Pocket PC / Windows Mobile 2003 software will run on it, too. However, it would be easy to spend lots of money buying all that software - most people can make do with the included apps.

By default all SMS, MMS and e-mail is done through a central "Messaging" application which works well but does mean you have to switch between your email 'inbox' and your text message 'inbox' quite often which is a bit annoying. Pocket Excel and Pocket Word, I would say, are fine for *starting* documents on the train that you intend to continue when you synchronize with a real computer. You could just about replace a laptop with a phone like this - but only if you use a laptop in the most basic of ways. And the keyboard would frustrate you if you wrote more than a couple of paragraphs.

While the e-mail client and web browser are adequate, I have found the Calendar application and Tasks applications to be ill thought-out. It's fine for viewing a single day, but the engineers could have gone further to show appointments on a small screen when 'zoomed-out' to week or month based views. They show as anonymous blocks which you must select with the stylus in order to read what they represent - a real cop-out, in my opinion. The 'Tasks' application pretends to have all the functionality of Outlook but, again, stops short of perfection by employing some frustrating design decisions. Unless you have very short 'to do' items like "Buy milk" you're going to hate the way the tasks don't wrap on the screen and are truncated instead. The best you can do is set the phone's system-wide font size to a very small size and open the keyboard to rotate the display and use the screen's width for a few extra characters.

I'm getting the most out of this phone by having a hosted Exchange account (or you can use your company's Exchange server if it has Outlook Web Access support). This provides e-mail folders which are always synchronized with those on my computer. When e-mail arrives, it is 'pushed' instantly to the device (even if the PDA element is switched off) by a hidden SMS message. It also synchronises all my Calendar appointments, Contacts and Tasks between the phone and the computer, over the air - awesome! You never have to use ActiveSync manually in this configuration. (If you want to read about it, it's called "Exchange ActiveSync" and the push-email element is called "Always Up To Date").

That's enough about Windows Mobile, except to say it's good, overall, and fun to play around with. You can do a LOT with a phone like this, there are so many possibilities. But if you just want a phone and you are not a gadget lover who enjoys fiddling with all the options on your latest toy, I'd stay away from this one.

The reason I haven't said much about the design of the phone is because it's just 'fine'. It gets the job done. It has logical (reprogrammable) buttons, a working directional pad, a reasonable microphone and it even has slightly-pointless stereo loudspeakers. The stylus looks nice and extends to a decent size, then tucks away in the bottom of the phone. It hasn't fallen out once in the three month's I've had it, and you get a spare one, too. It's sort of a "Jack of all trades, master of none of a phone but is incredibly flexible, as I've said.

Incidentally if, like me, you can't stand the T-mobile-installed pink colour scheme and the hideous pink T-mobile logo printed on the web browser button, you can uninstall them and scratch them off, respectively, with ease.

A word about the 1.3 mega-pixel camera: it is *terrible*. I don't even bother with mine, once I'd finished playing with it. The quality of pictures is woeful, the shutter is slow, and the video-recording is a mere gesture (as though they were scared to leave it out). You might decide it sort of lets the whole thing down, but only if you feel you'd use it a lot. I'd even forgotten it was there until I came to write this review, but I'm sure it'll come in handy one day. It certainly isn't a digital camera replacement.

Now, I am a Mac user, not a Windows user. It is heart breaking to have a wonderful computer and a wonderful phone/PDA and not to be able to get them to work together. You can use Bluetooth to transfer files to and from a Mac and that is about it. There are two products that will, one day, let you synchronize this phone with a Mac: "PocketMac" and "Missing Sync" but currently neither support Windows Mobile 2005. The authors of both products have been saying that support is "coming soon" for many months - but neither has anything to show for it, nor will they give any dates. However, if you have a hosted Exchange account synchronized with your phone, as mentioned above, you can get most of the functionality you want: Apple's "Address Book" will synchronize with that same Exchange Server (and therefore with your phone) and so will Apple's "Mail". iCal can be synchronised with Exchange using a product called GroupCal from Snerdware.com - but it is very expensive and a bit buggy. However, this takes care of synchronising your Calendar and Tasks. Alternatively, you can bite the bullet and use Microsoft Entourage from Office 2004 for Mac. This will synchronise with Exchange for Calendar, Contacts and e-mail but not for Tasks.

Performance: 6/10 - sometimes snappy, sometimes slow. It depends.
Features: 9/10 - lost a point for the camera.
Design: 9/10 - no major design issues. It's "nice".
Overall: 8/10

Note: for some reason Ciao insisted that I rate this phone's "Quality of shave". Well, frankly, I tried but have found it rubbish at shaving, though it's quite good at making and receiving phone calls.
 

...less