Windows Phone Thoughts: T-Mobile Wings It

Svelte, Smooth, and Rubbery
A few days after T-Mobile tentatively christened The Wing, our sales rep from HTC visited us to show off some new toys. I should explain that I work for a company that is one of the largest Master Agents for T-Mobile in the country, so every once in awhile someone drops by to hawk their wares. When he put the Wing in my hand, I knew right then and there that this baby was light years ahead of the MDA.

Yesterday, I got my hands on one before it hit the stores and I've had some time to play with it now. Let's talk first impressions.

The first thing you notice about the Wing is the size of it. It's about the same width as the MDA, but significantly thinner with a bigger screen and better-placed buttons. Gone is the coppery/silver facade replaced by a rubberized blue outer shell like the one found on the Zune or the Motorola V300. In a word, it feels great in your hands even when it's closed. On the front of the Wing are two new buttons for MDA owners; a Windows key, and an OK key. These are not new and in fact existed much earlier on devices like the HTC Apache (aka: The Sprint 6700 and the Verizon VX6700), but it's nice to see them make an appearance on the Wing, too.


Figure 1: The Wing, opened, to expose the keyboard.

When you open it, the Wing emits a nice little chime to let you know that you've opened it. Unlike the MDA which often bound up on the plastic rails, the Wing slides gracefully along a slightly spring-loaded track. After opening, the screen rotates around and you're exposed to a fantastically type-able miniature QWERTY keyboard. You'll immediately notice a few usability tweaks over the MDA including led lights to indicate CAPS and ALT status (a brilliant idea I'm surprised they didn't try earlier) and the softkeys have been moved to correspond to their location on the screen. HTC was also kind enough to cover every single key with a shortcut of some kind. There are shortcuts to everything from symbols and punctuation to different applications. Unlike the MDA, the Wing's numeric keypad is in a more traditional configuration for a phone (3 rows of 3) than a typewriter (1 row of 10). Numeric dialling with the keyboard is accomplished by holding the Alt key and typing the number, or by double tapping the Alt key to lock it in place.

Across the side are an array of application specific keys. Starting with the left side of the Wing, from the bottom, you have a MicroSD slot, you have the volume up/down slider, and you have a camera button. Across the top is only the power button, and then down the right side is the messaging button and the Voice Command button. Holding the messaging button will bring you to the Voice Recorder. All the buttons are easily accessible. On the bottom edge, you have a mini USB port which serves as the power port and headset jack.


Figure 2: The back of the Wing.

On the back of the wing, you have the camera lens. It's notable that HTC didn't build in a flash, but in reality does anyone ever use those silly things on a camera phone anyway? I certainly don't.