T-Mobile Wing          

(Review) - After the success of T-Mobile’s Sidekick series, the company is at it again with smartphones, and this time, it’s an early adopter of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6 OS. That fact alone should make it very interesting, and interesting it is. T-Mobile has always gone after the young and hip crowd, and the Wing is no different in that regard.

The vibrant exterior of the Wing is bluish in color, an ideal color choice for teens and 20-somethings. We get the feeling that T-Mobile may be going after the professional crowd, but we doubt too many professionals would go after such a trendy looking device.

The T-Mobile Wing offers a rubbery grip that makes it more comfortable to hold. And trust us, you are going to need a solid grip to hold the Wing, as it’s larger and heavier than average smartphones. Not to mention, you better have decently sized hands as well. Basically, it’s going to be awkward making phone calls with the Wing. The key display on the Wing is 2.8-inches, supports 65k colors and 240x320 resolution. We were impressed with the crisp, bright display, and we had absolutely no problem working with documents, emails and multimedia files. Unfortunately though, the Wing isn’t the best outdoors smartphone, as it gets relatively difficult to see what’s going on in direct sunlight. However, it’s not such a big deal. Oh, and did we mention the Wing has a touch screen display, which is very handy.

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Below the display are various navigation keys, including the two soft keys, the Talk and End keys, an OK and Start Menu keys and a 4-way navigational key. They are tactile, and average just like you would expect them to be. As you move to the left edge, you will encounter a volume control slider, a microSD expansion slot and the camera activation button. On the right edge, there are voice recorder and messages keys. In essence, the T-Mobile Wing has a relatively clean layout. Of course, all keys are programmable that you can use to launch other applications.

For the messaging fanatics, here’s the fun part. Similar to T-Mobile’s Sidekick, you can slide the front display to reveal the QWERTY keyboard, which is quite attractive. The display slides open perfectly, and automatically switches the picture mode from portrait to landscape. The keys are also tactile, albeit they lack space in between them, thereby making them unpleasant to type with. As is the case with a number of smartphones, the keys are alphanumeric that can be interchanged with the Alt key. Interestingly and rather usefully, we must add, there are two tiny LED lights (along with two additional soft keys), similar to the ones on full sized keyboards, that will enable you to get an actual visual of Alt and Caps status. Now only if Palm and BlackBerry could add such an alert…

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