Liam Westley

T-mobile have tempted me to change from Orange with a cracking special offer, with a 40Mb per month GPRS allowance, coupled with 200 minutes of cross network calls for a very cheap £16 per month for 12 months (and £35 for 6 months).  And I was given a HTC Wizard handset free as part of the deal.

So I have upgraded my mobile phone from the HTC Typhoon (sold as; I-mate SP3, Qtek 8010, Orange SPV C500/C500S, Audiovox SMT 5600, Dopod 565) to the HTC Wizard (sold as; Qtek 9100, I-mate K-Jam, T-mobile MDA Vario, Orange SPV M6000, O2 XDA Mini Pro, Dpod 838).  I'll be reserving the option to switch between the two handsets - moving my SIM card as necessary. 

Initial thoughts:

• I'm not convinced the HTC Wizard has all the phone features I would have liked.  I cannot find any profile management - on the Typhoon you can switch quickly between Normal/Meeting/Silent/Outdoor.  It have only found the three settings Ring/Vibrate only/Silent.
• I definitely miss the 'Home' and 'Back' keys from the HTC Typhoon.  It makes navigation between apps a bit more fiddly. 
• On the HTC Wizard you can press the 'end call' key to go back to the today screen from any application, however if you have a call active (voice or data) it will end that call in the process
• I love the keyboard.  It will take some getting used to, I used to have an iPaq and I'm so familiar with the on screen keyboard and Transcriber I keep forgetting I have a QWERTY keyboard available.
• T-mobile have 'disabled' the 802.11g wireless in their ROM image, and the 802.11b that they implement refuses to connect to a Belkin Pre-N router in b/g mode.  I suspect it finds the 'g' part for initial connection, and then the ROM limitation kicks in and prevents connection.  I have a laptop that is 802.11b only and this connects fine to the Belkin router.  This is a common problem and if you replace the ROM with the i-Mate JasJar ROM you get the 802.11g and all works well.
• I'm impressed Windows Mobile 2005 allowed installation of TCPMP (free media player) which was really compiled for Windows Mobile 2003
• I'm less impressed that once you use TCPMP, a 'legacy' application which doesn't know about the soft key buttons, WM2005 appears to disable the soft key buttons permanently until you perform a soft reset

And I've only had it for two days ...