T-Mobile Dash

Watch out, Motorola Q. The T-Mobile Dash is an even cuter morsel of Windows Mobile tastiness, ready to take on BlackBerrys and Treos for the crown of the hottest, smartest handheld around.

The Dash is essentially the more evolved descendent of the T-Mobile MDA and SDA. Like the SDA, it has excellent phone performance, combines EDGE with Wi-Fi for networking, and runs the Windows Mobile Smartphone 5 operating system. And just like the MDA, it has a keyboard.

The Dash is more about finesse than power. It's extremely elegant, clad in soft-touch black plastic that feels great in the hand. The handset is light but feels solid; it weighs 4.2 ounces. The 2.5-inch, landscape-format screen has a resolution of 320-by-240 and is both sharp and bright (though it isn't a touch screen). Below the screen are a cursor pad, soft keys, and a QWERTY keyboard. All the keys are quite small but are domed and slightly separated, so they're comfortable for typing.

HTC, the makers of the Dash, did make one design misstep. Instead of buttons, the volume control is a vertical touchpad slider to the right of the screen. The problem? Although the Dash plays a little tone telling you that you pressed a button to change the volume, there's no physical feedback. This makes it extremely difficult to know how accurately you're changing the volume—especially when you hold the handset up to your head.

Turn on the Dash (and wait 40 seconds, just like with the SDA) to get a tight little start-up screen with one enhancement over older smartphones: The little recent-application icons at the top of the screen are explained with text. Start to dial a number and the phone kicks into phone mode. Like the SDA and the Q, but unlike the MDA, this is a terrific phone. It isn't the loudest, but calls are extremely sharp, with no background hiss. The built-in microphone doesn't cancel background noise, but voices punch right through. The speakerphone is on the back, and it's just okay in terms of volume—good enough in most conditions, but it could be overwhelmed outdoors. The speakerphone mic is pleasantly robust, though.

The Dash also uses T-Mobile's new MyFaves service, which lets you call five contacts anywhere in the US for free, putting cute icons for the five contacts on your home screen and letting you call or message them with a few clicks. In general, it's a fun application, and especially makes picture messaging much easier. The Dash's MyFaves implementation has one annoying aspect, though: in some situations you get returned not to your home screen, but to an intermediate MyFaves screen. You can then return to your home screen by pressing the "hang up" button, but that's a perplexing, unecessary keypress.

The Dash lets you connect separate Bluetooth devices for headset and wireless stereo music devices, or use one stereo headset for both types of devices. Ours connected easily with a Motorola HT820 headset, and we could activate voice tag–based voice dialing over Bluetooth. The Motorola Q's VoiceSignal system is superior, though.

Music and audio from video tracks played through the Motorola Stereo Bluetooth Headset HT820 via Windows Media Player also sounded good. Thrillingly, you can finally play video in full-screen mode, something that didn't work on previous Windows Mobile Smartphone OS devices. Media playback on the Dash is loud enough to hear in most indoor environments. Sling Player Mobile launched on our Dash and tried to connect to our Slingbox, though we couldn't test the frame rates because of network problems.

An integrated 1.3-megapixel camera takes pretty sharp pictures, although they suffer from a lack of saturation and a tendency to wash out in bright areas. Unfortunately, the video mode captures unremarkable 176-by-144, 10-frames-per-second videos.

Powering the handset is a 200-MHz TI OMAP 850 processor that performs almost exactly on a par with the SDA and MDA in most applications—though power users will grumble about the impossibility of running processor-hogging apps such as Skype. I'd prefer more than the 22MB of available memory for running programs, but it's a big jump over the SDA's cramped 11MB. The 68MB of free storage memory is sufficient, especially if added to an up-to-2GB microSD card that you slip into a slot in the side of the Dash. (You have to remove the back of the case to add the card, but fortunately, you don't have to remove the battery.) Battery life, by the way, is excellent considering the small size of the device.

The Dash is extremely well connected. It links to the Internet either through T-Mobile's EDGE network—we got speeds between 86 and 134 Kbps—or Wi-Fi. The service plan you'll need costs a reasonable $29.99 per month for unlimited EDGE and T-Mobile Wi-Fi hot-spot use. The device supports WEP, WPA, and WPA2 encryption, and there's a very attractive "communication manager" application that lets you control the EDGE, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi radios all from one screen, along with Microsoft's Direct Push e-mail system. Web browsing in Pocket Internet Explorer felt quite zippy over Wi-Fi. A built-in application lets you use the Dash as a Wi-Fi or USB modem for your laptop.

Sadly, the Windows Mobile Smartphone OS is still missing one key part of the smart-device equation: Editing Microsoft Office documents isn't an option! Although the Dash comes with ClearVue's viewers for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files, there's no actual way to change the files. It's shocking that neither Microsoft nor DataViz has stepped up to the plate there. Otherwise, the Dash comes with the standard set of smartphone apps, plus a utility for auto-connecting to T-Mobile's Wi-Fi hot spots and the OZ instant-messaging client, which supports AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo!

The T-Mobile Dash is now the carrier's top handheld. It knocks the poor little MDA out of the park with better phone performance and a more pocket-friendly size, and it bests the SDA by providing a keyboard. It's a cool little smartphone that deserves a place in the top rank of handhelds, and it's a worthy competitor to the BlackBerry Pearl, Motorola Q, and Palm Treo 700p.

SPEC DATA :

• Service Provider: AT&T
• Operating System: Palm OS
• Screen Size: 1.6 inches
• Screen Details: 320x240, 65k-color display
• Camera: Yes
• Megapixels: 1.3 MP
• Flash Memory Type: Micro SD
• Bluetooth: Yes
• Web Browser: Yes
• Network: GSM
• Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
• High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE
• Special Features: Music