Windows Phone Thoughts: T-Mobile Wings It

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

T-Mobile Wings It

Posted by Vincent M Ferrari in "HARDWARE" @ 07:00 AM


The egg is hatched...
I can honestly say, it works at least as well as the MDA an in some ways better. The Wing has a 200 Mhz processor, but it feels much snappier than the MDA. Applications pop open, key presses are responsive, and overall performance is quite acceptable. It's not great; we're not talking about a really fast chip here, after all, but in the end, it's more than good enough for some on the go music, mobile web browsing, texting/e-mailing, and so on. In my informal observations, even with a few applications open, the Wing continued to respond well. Occasionally I would get the dreaded "Low on System Memory" message, but closing a few open applications took care of them.

Another nice feature of the Wing is that it finally corrects one of the dumbest UI moves in the history of operating systems. The X in the upper right hand can be set to minimize or close (the default action) a running application. HTC is also kind enough to toss in a pretty good task manager that you can access from the Today screen that will show you all your running applications and allow you to close them from there.

T-Mobile is also as stingy, as far as including apps, as it was with the MDA. They include the OZ IM client which connects you to Yahoo!, AIM, and ICQ. You can, as always, connect to MSN through the included client (which is recommended because it doesn't come off your pool of text messages if you do). Very little outside of the standard bundle appears in the Today screen; the most notable change being if you have MyFaves, those icons will appear on your Today screen, but that's an option you can disable if you prefer a more uncluttered appearance.

Turning data connections on and off is a breeze. As with previous HTC handhelds, the Wing ships with an excellent Communications Manager that lets you selectively enable and disable all three radios (GSM, BlueTooth, and WiFi). The Communications Manager is no longer on a dedicated button, but there is a Today Screen plug-in that will show you the status of the WiFi and BlueTooth radios. Also, unlike the MDA, the Wing will let you know when you have EDGE coverage versus when you have regular GPRS coverage. Previously, on the MDA, you had to hack the registry to get anything but a G in the status bar.

In another upgrade from the MDA, the Wing comes with 802.11g and it's enabled by default. On the MDA, you had to hack the registry to get 802.11g support, so this is a welcome reprieve for people tired of hacking their handhelds.

The buzzard heads for the ground
So far, in my testing, I've only noticed two things that are particularly of interest as far as negatives.

The first problem is that the WiFi radio seems to have issues when it's not on "Full Power" mode. In the WiFi settings, you can lower power draw to increase battery performance. The default for the Wing is set at halfway between the Best Performance and Best Battery settings. In both my office test with a Linksys WAP54g and at home with the Apple Airport Extreme N, connections dropped frequently and performance was disappointing. Bumping the power up to full mode solved the problem, but be aware you're going to be chopping down your battery life if you do this.

The second problem seems to be in prioritizing connections. For some reason, turning on the WiFi doesn't give priority to WiFi for data connections over EDGE / GPRS. After working out the power issue above, I noticed I was still having issues with speed. I went into Communications Manager, turned off the Data Connection, and left the WiFi running. When I loaded Internet Explorer, all was right with the world.

I haven't tested any other Windows Mobile 6 devices, so I can't say for certain whether this is a bug with Windows Mobile or if it's a bug with the Wing, but it is something to be aware of.

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