by Frank McPherson, author of How To Do Everything With Windows Mobile

 
Recently my T-Mobile Dash started acting flaky. I was often draining the battery all the way down because I would forget to charge it. I have been using the Tytnn more since I have all my email forwarding to Gmail and have my personal T-Mobile number forwarding to my work AT&T number. So, I would recharge the Dash and then turn it on and it would start booting, get to the Windows Mobile startup screen, and then reboot again. First it would do this a couple of times then successfully start up fully, but last week it would just continually boot. Now, it probably just needs a new battery, but would be the fun in getting a new battery when I could get a whole new phone? So yesterday I went to the local T-Mobile store and "upgraded" to the T-Mobile Shadow.

Obviously, I have not used the Shadow enough to give it a proper review so right now all I can do is give my out of the box impressions. The Shadow is smaller than the Dash so that will make carrying it around even easier. I find the external appearance of the Shadow to be very elegant, even if the screen is a finger print magnet.

Aside from the hardware design, which includes a slide out 20-key keyboard, perhaps the big thing with the Shadow is the customized home screen that changes how Windows Mobile looks on a Smartphone. The Shadow has a scroll wheel on the front that doesn't work as I expect with the home screen because you have to press up or down to scroll throw the icons while I it seems more natural to me to actually use the scroll wheel to scroll through the icons.

One thing that I really don't like is location of the mini-USB port which is on the left side of the device. It might be a better location for using a headset (while I do tend to use a Bluetooth headset with my phones more than wired headsets) it doesn't work at all with my PowerStation recharging unit, which expects the plugs to be on the bottom of the device. The PowerStation grabs the device on the left and right side to hold it in place and that can't happen with the USB cable plugged in.

T-Mobile recently released an update to the Shadow's software so that is what I did last night. I've been using Windows Mobile since it's beginning (is it really more than ten years?) and I am amazed at how painful it still is to do a ROM Update. Somehow Apple has figured out how to do a ROM update of the iPod Touch without deleting all the data on the device, while Microsoft still wipes everything requiring the user to restore from a backup or find other ways to reenter data. Incredible.

I'll have more on the Shadow as I use it. Next up is to get it syncing with my hosted Exchange service and get the essential software installed like eWallet.

Labels: 2008, Shadow

posted by Frank at 11:44 AM 1 comments Links to this post