What WinMo lurks in the heart of T-Mobile customers? Only the Shadow knows…
T-Mobile has an interesting Windows Mobile 6 slider on the way this week. In fact, at $149 the T-Mobile Shadow might make a nice little trick-or-treat gift since you can get it in your goodie bag starting on Halloween. Matt Miller says the 2.6-inch QVGA display isn’t a touchscreen, so this will run the Standard Edition of Windows Mobile. Most of the WinMo sliders I’ve seen are pretty beefy when it comes to thickness, but according to Matt, the Shadow shows as only a half-inch in thickness.You won’t get a full traditional QWERTY keypad like you do on the Tilt or Mogul, but you get what I think is the next best thing: a SureType keypad, i.e.: each button is used for one of two letters. Well, except for “M” and “L”, which are literally, the odd men out. Although I haven’t used this type of input method on a smartphone yet, I expect that it will work very well when combined with the excellent word completion that Windows Mobile offers. The Shadow has EDGE support as well as WiFi. On the downside, 3G would be nice but with no 3G network in place it would be a waste at this time. The upside: looks like you can get a brand new, very capable Windows Mobile smartphone for a reasonable price.
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I hope SureType keypads aren’t the new hot thing, I want to see dual pads, T9 and QWERTY, become popular. Fast blind/one-handed general typing, plus easy username/password/part number/etc entry, neither of which is easy with SureType.