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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.