T-Mobile MDA Vario II review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 17 May 2007

Price when reviewed: £170

Supplier: http://www.t-mobile.co.uk

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The MDA Vario II is slightly larger than HP's iPAQ rw6815 and looks similar.

However, slide the screen across and a QWERTY keyboard appears. The keys are four times the size of those on the Treo 680, MDA Mail and Sony Ericsson P990i. Typing is fast and comfortable, but punctuation is awkward, as the function key is crammed on the edge of the keypad.

You can control the Vario II with a stylus or directional keys. There's also a thumbwheel, which isn't great for navigating the operating system but is ideal for scrolling through webpages, mail and documents. The Vario II can edit Word and Excel documents and view PowerPoint files and PDFs.

The phone supports 3G and WiFi. A wizard makes it easy to connect by searching for available networks and asking for a network key. Pocket Internet Explorer runs smoothly, but takes a long time to load and format very large and image-heavy webpages. Setting up an email account is simple, thanks to the EmailWiz application. This provides settings for major email providers such as GoogleMail, Yahoo! and Pipex.

The Vario II is easily the heaviest phone in the group at 176g. Call quality isn't particularly good, and some recipients complained that voices sounded distant. Using a Bluetooth headset fixed the problem.

This superb smartphone is easily the most capable of the larger devices here. It's very expensive, but if its price were to drop it would be a great buy.

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