Mobile Phone Reviews

T-Mobile USA, Inc., today announces the upcoming availability of the T-Mobile Shadow™ – the first phone in a planned franchise of phones under the Shadow brand, a name that will become synonymous with playful, easier and richer communications experiences offered only by T-Mobile.

Weighing 5.3 ounces and measuring 0.6 inches thin, the T-Mobile Shadow isn’t quite as svelte as the BlackBerry Pearl, but it feels lighter than it looks. Plus, it’s the most stylish Windows Mobile 6 phone yet. With its navigation wheel, soft-touch finish on the back, and large 2.6-inch display, this phone could be easily mistaken for an MP3 player.

The Shadow is a rather wide phone at 4.06 by 2.09 by 0.59 inches and weighs 5.29 ounces, but it surprisingly doesn’t feel huge or heavy. Its appearance is luxurious, with its subdued gray and silver color and soft-touch back. The center of the scroll wheel lights up when you’re using it, and the keys are backlit, too. The slide takes some effort to get going, but slides smoothly and quickly.
The phone itself is about as big as the Pearl when closed and as long as the Sidekick 3 when open. It’s quite compact and has a central scroll wheel and six buttons on the face — call handling, home, back, and two function buttons. Sliding open the phone reveals MyFaves and clicking the scroll wheel lets you switch between applications. Clicking on a selection starts up that app and they’ve done an excellent job of hiding the media player behind a bright and easy to use interface.

The battery life with WiFi was quite disappointing, so I tried to turn WiFi off. Without it, the phone could not last for 12 hours of mild usage. That means that it will have to be charged everywhere (car, job, home) if you use it normally. Heavy users will probably get frustrated with it.

The Shadow has a cute, animated interface with a 2.6-inch, 320-by-240 rich color screen. T-Mobile and HTC, the Shadow’s manufacturer, worked together to make Windows Mobile look cuddlier and less businesslike than it does on other devices. Slide the Shadow’s screen up and it comes alive with an animated menu and eight main options arranged vertically: MyFaves,

Laptop Mag reviews the T-Mobile Shadow and writes, “The rest of the design is very much in line with the Shadow’s minimalist approach. There are six subtle buttons that flank either side of the nav wheel, including the two soft menu keys, Home and Back keys, and Send and End keys. The left side of the Shadow houses the volume buttons, USB/headset jack, and microSD slot; a shortcut key lines the right side, along with a launch key/shutter button for the relatively crisp but slow-on-the-draw two-megapixel camera. Some of these buttons are a bit too recessed, but we got used to them within a couple days.”

PC Mag reviews the T-Mobile Shadow and writes, “To get good photos with the Shadow, you have to stand still; the flashless 2-megapixel camera has a 0.9-second shutter delay and a problem with blurring in low light, but when I held perfectly still I was rewarded with sharp, dramatic indoor shots. On outdoor shots, bright areas were overexposed. The Shadow’s video mode is nearly useless: It takes jerky, grainy 176-by-144 videos that aren’t compatible with either QuickTime or Windows Media Player for playback. I had to use VLC, a relatively obscure open-source player, to watch the videos properly.”

Cnet ratings-: 6.2/10