T-Mobile Shadow

The Shadow is an appropriate name for T-Mobile's new slick slider. That's because it doesn't wear its smartphoneness on its sleeve (see our photo gallery). In fact, it's really more akin to an LG Chocolate--with a brain and Wi-Fi--than your typical BlackBerry, Treo, or BlackJack. Even better, this handset hides (but doesn't eliminate) the confusing Windows Mobile desktop with a custom user interface that lets you do nearly everything from the main screen. So long as you can tolerate the sometimes frustrating QWERTY-like keyboard, you'll be psyched to sport the Shadow.

 

Weighing 5.3 ounces and measuring 0.6 inches thin, the T-Mobile Shadow isn't quite as svelte as the BlackBerry Pearl, but it feels lighter than it looks. Plus, it's the most stylish Windows Mobile 6 phone yet. With its navigation wheel, soft-touch finish on the back, and large 2.6-inch display, this phone could be easily mistaken for an MP3 player.

 

The media player is just one of several features you can access without digging into the Start menu; everything from your myFaves contacts to your photos is available from the revamped Today screen. Press the nav wheel down to Today, for example, and you can then scroll through the day's appointments--without opening that program. Within the Messaging Center, you can toggle among text messages, picture messages, and e-mail, and launch whichever option you like by pressing the center of the nav wheel. One especially nice touch is that the nav wheel lights up when you have a new message, regardless of what you're doing.

 

The other impressive thing about this custom UI is that the options available to you change based on what you're previewing. You can play and pause music playback (complete with album art support) from the main screen with a press of the nav wheel, or choose to go Full Screen for more options. And within Message Center, there's an option to compose a message with a press of the Right soft key. Like all WM6 standard phones, you can view and edit, but not create, Office documents on the go.

 

We do have one complaint and one suggestion. First, we would have liked to see instant messaging as an option within the top-level interface. (Yes, you can instant message any of your myFaves contacts directly from that menu if they're online, but otherwise you have to launch the app from the Start menu.) Second, we'd like T-Mobile to make this interface more flexible, so you could customize it with RSS feeds or other widgets.  

 

The rest of the design is very much in line with the Shadow's minimalist approach. There are six subtle buttons that flank either side of the nav wheel, including the two soft menu keys, Home and Back keys, and Send and End keys. The left side of the Shadow houses the volume buttons, USB/headset jack, and microSD slot; a shortcut key lines the right side, along with a launch key/shutter button for the relatively crisp but slow-on-the-draw two-megapixel camera. Some of these buttons are a bit too recessed, but we got used to them within a couple days.

 

What you may never get used to is the QWERTY-like keyboard. Like the BlackBerry Pearl, the Shadow crams two letters on most of the keys to save space. This layout works with XT9 software to attempt to guess the words as you peck, and the keys here are bigger but flatter than the Pearl's. The results were fairly accurate, but the Shadow doesn't recognize proper names and URLs at first. The good news is that XT9 remembers those words the second time around.

 

However, the system also has trouble guessing words that can result from the same combination of keys, such as "are" and "see." It couldn't even recognize the word "hotspot" (it came out as "gotaoot"), surprising for a phone that supports T-Mobile's HotSpot service. The upshot is that you have to look at what you're typing and make more corrections than you would with a full QWERTY smart phone. On the plus side, there are several helpful settings that can ease your frustration (like Spell Correction and Next Word Prediction).

 

For a slim slider running a sophisticated OS like WM6, the T-Mobile Shadow offered pretty good performance. The 201-MHz processor allowed us to listen to our tunes while loading a news story on CNN.com Mobile about the Red Sox sweeping the Rockies. And because the Shadow has 72MB of user-accessible memory, we didn't encounter a single out-of-memory message.

 

Predictably, surfing the Web over T-Mobile's EDGE network was sluggish using Internet Explorer Mobile, and much faster via Wi-Fi. For example, Yahoo took 50 seconds to load over the former connection and 26 seconds over the latter. So you'll probably want to stick to mobile-optimized sites when you're out of hotspot range. Too bad you can't make voice calls over Wi-Fi, as you can with the BlackBerry Curve 8320.

 

We found the voice quality to be pretty clear on the T-Mobile Shadow during our tests in Manhattan and New Jersey, although we wish there was a bit more volume on our end. A test voicemail message on a landline sounded just as good as one left with an AT&T BlackBerry Curve. The speaker was plenty loud, but it's on the back of the device, so you'll have to flip the phone over on the table or on your passenger seat during longer conference calls. Battery life was respectable; our device lasted about 2.5 days on a charge, and that's with scheduled e-mail send/receive turned on.

 

Microsoft's excellent Voice Command is on board, which means you can voice dial with ease, as well as perform sweet audio shortcuts. We said "Media Player Evanescence" after pressing and holding the shortcut button, and the first track from the album started playing within a few seconds. T-Mobile bundles a decent set of earbuds, but you'll get a lot more out of the Shadow with a Bluetooth stereo headset.

 

The T-Mobile Shadow was designed to be a messaging and multimedia device first and a productivity tool second, and it succeeds in hitting its target market. E-mail junkies will likely prefer the identically priced BlackBerry Pearl, which is even smaller and lighter, but this Windows Mobile device makes more of a statement while making the transition from a traditional phone to a smart one less of a leap.

 

 

T-Mobile Shadow First Impressions
Fashionable new slider trims down QWERTY, sports a slicker Windows Mobile menu, and packs Wi-Fi.

 

The Mogul is the best Windows Mobile 6 phone yet, but Sprint's Music Store integration falls a little flat.

 

Microsoft's new smart phone OS isn't revolutionary, but it's faster and offers many welcome productivity improvements.