T-Mobile MDA Compact III review

T-Mobile makes two types of Windows Mobile PDA smartphone: the MDA Vario range consists of chunky smartphones with slide-out QWERTY keyboards, while the MDA Compact range is made up of sleeker phones that make do with a touchscreen.

The MDA Compact III is the latest in the Compact range.

While the Compact II had a feminine, rounded shape, the III is all angles and edges. It's also steel grey rather than pink and looks more businesslike. One of the main differences is in the keypad under the screen. The directional keypad has been replaced with a rubber joystick surrounded by a click wheel, which you use to scroll through menu options, contacts and emails. The wheel works better than a keypad in some situations but not in others. It feels more natural when scrolling through an email or browsing your contacts, but to scroll left and right on webpages is a chore with the tiny joystick.

The Compact III is easier to use as a phone, however. There are now dedicated buttons for the home screen's menu options, so you can press a button to bring up your contacts list rather than having to use the touchscreen. Calling someone is now as simple as pressing the contacts button, scrolling to your contact and pressing the green call button, which is an improvement on most Windows Mobile PDA smartphones. Call quality is excellent.

The Compact III is also the first T-Mobile smartphone with an integrated GPS receiver. This means that you don't need a Bluetooth receiver to use satellite navigation software, so there's one less thing to plug into your cigarette lighter socket.

You can buy the Compact III bundled with ALK's CoPilot software. It's impressive to have such a small phone with built-in GPS, but it's a shame there was no room for wireless networking or 3G data. You're stuck with low-speed GPRS, so webpages are slow to load and it's not practical to receive large email attachments.

The phone's Windows Mobile 5 operating system comes with Pocket Outlook for email. If you have a POP3 email account with a big provider such as AOL or Google Mail, T-Mobile's email setup wizard makes it easy to configure your mailbox settings.

The phone's camera is a big improvement over the Compact II's. It doesn't have a flash or LED for low-light shots, but images are sharp, in focus and have vibrant colours and good contrast. There is room for around 150 shots in the phone's internal memory. Unfortunately, the phone uses Micro-SD cards, so you may have to invest in a new memory card. It's also a pain to install one, as you have to take the phone apart to get at it.

T-Mobile's MDA Compact III is better than its predecessor, and is a small and stylish PDA smartphone that is easy to use as a phone. Unfortunately, the lack of 3G and wireless networking restrict its internet and messaging capabilities. We'd go for the MDA Vario II, which has 3G, wireless and a keyboard.

Author: Chris Finnamore