T-Mobile Wing Smartphone

The t-mobile Wing is a knockout Windows Mobile PDA. Its price point is still quite high (mine cost $300 to buy because I wanted to keep and carry over my original t-mobile plan; I've heard that you can get the Wing for beans if you are a new customer, however). But it is worth it if you want a good smartphone that has all the qualities you would expect from a PDA : from internet surfing to IM'ing to taking snapshots to keeping your calendar synced up with Outlook on a computer. It's all there and it all works quite well. Worth a buy.

THE PROS:
I >almost< got a Palm Centrino from Sprint when I went smartphone shopping, because I've been a loyal Palm PDA user for years. But its keyboard was so tiny, my fingers wouldn't work on it. The Wing sold me with its fancy slide out keyboard, with copious keysize and ease of use. When you glide out the keyboard from the bottom of the device, the large screen rotates to accompany your action and transforms the creature into a really nice micro-sized laptop! The phone comes with MS Office (scaled down for WinMo6 os) built right in, so it's easy peasy to do your work on the device. I was never big on texting before I got this thing... but now I prefer to send SMS messages using this typewriter. Texting flies on the Wing. It's a joy.

THE CONS:
The Wing doesn't seem to have enough built-in memory to really handle multitasking...even though multitasking is why you would want Windows Mobile in the first place. Sometimes the phone acts sluggish if you forget to close programs (and you WILL forget they're running in the background because of how the operating system overlays them on top of each other). There is a fragility about the large plastic screen and the mechanism that controls the slide-out keyboard -- I haven't broken it yet, but I live in fear that I will. But the case is a nice rubberized surface, so my fear may be unfounded since it seems to be adequately "skinned."

The Wing can play media like mp3s, but it does not make mp3 playing easy. You have to split the power cord on a proprietary Y connector to listen to headphones. That makes it cumbersome and you have to carry that y connector with you everywhere...thus, this is not an iPhone killer by any means.

The Wing is working in concert with my Mac Book laptop. I had to get "The Missing Sync" software to make this happen. But sometimes it is not smooth sailing when I try to use ActiveSync. I suspect the Wing works better with a PC than a Mac (duh! it's a Windows' product...but it had to be said).