Digital Trends

T-Mobile SDA

February 7th, 2006 | by Vince Veneziani

Testing and Use

So the SDA has some great features and some not-so-great ones. But what about phone calls? The SDA is a phone after all. In the city of Philadelphia, the SDA performed great. I received excellent, crisp call-quality, no drops, and good reception overall. If you're just going to use the SDA as a phone, you'll be very happy with your choice. I highly recommend the SDA as far as phone calls go.

Looking to browse the Internet with the SDA? It's very possible with the phone's built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b and GPRS/EDGE capabilities. When using Internet Explorer to view websites with just a regular phone signal, it was surprisingly speedy which made it easy for me to locate a nearby shop via Google. When I was at a Starbucks or a T-Mobile Hotspot, the SDA was sure to let me know. I connected very quickly with my account information and loved the download speeds I was getting on some MP3 and movie downloads. 500KB/Second on a cell phone? Simply unheard of, but it worked! The SDA is wonderful for browsing the Internet, but make sure you bookmark frequently visited sites or your fingers will fall off trying to type out a URL on the small keypad.

Don't plan on doing any photography with the SDA's 1.3-megapixel camera. The quality isn't up to par like some other 1.3MP phones such as Samsung's T809 or Sony Ericsson's 2.0MP monster: The W800i. In proper lighting conditions, the camera was pretty decent and did well with pictures of people, objects, and buildings. However, when the clouds came out, a light got dimmed, or anything of the sort, the SDA's camera took horrible pictures that remind me of the first generation camera-phones. The camera also has video-recording capabilities that work very well actually. I took a 30-second video of my girlfriend and grandmother chatting by a fire in low light and was surprised with the results. You can have a lot of fun with the video functions on the SDA, just not as much with the camera though, which is a shame.

Compared to other phones out there, including T-Mobile's soon-to-be-released MDA, the SDA is more of a starter phone for the Windows Mobile world and is not meant for anyone that is a power-user. The lack of a QWERTY-style keypad makes the SDA limited in functionality and will make you cringe when you need to type out a message. Perhaps you may want to try out another HTC phone or just settle for carrying around a PDA like a Dell Axim and a smaller phone like a Motorola RAZR. It all depends on how you can adjust to the SDA and using it daily.

T-Mobile SDA