Folks, we've got a phone with multiple personality disorder here, and that's not altogether a bad thing. The T-Mobile SDA (not to be confused with the older Euro T-Mo SDA, but rather their SDA II) was released in the US in Feb. 2006 and it wants to be your everything... almost. While it lacks the serious editing skills that its QWERTY keyboard-ed, touch screen-enabled big brother the MDA offers; the SDA wants to be your pocketable phone, business tool, PDA, WiFi hotspot surfing buddy and MP3 player. Oh yes, and your camera phone, your streaming video player and your GSM world phone. Cross the older Audiovox SMT6500 with a Sony Ericsson W800i and throw in a little Pocket PC and you've got the multi-faceted SDA.


Surprisingly, the phone fits all of this into a device of reasonably modest proportions, and it weighs only 3.74 ounces. Like most PDA phones and Smartphones that run Windows Mobile 5.0, the SDA comes from ODM HTC in Taiwan, and its codename is the HTC Tornado. It's the same beast as the i-mate SP5m, QTEK 8300 and a close cousin to the Cingular 2125. What the SDA adds to the design is its Quasimodo hump, supposedly to improve US GSM reception (Cingular also hunchbacked their 2125). Having used both the SP5m and the SDA on T-Mobile's service in the US, I can't say I've noticed significant reception improvements with the hump, which isn't too terrible looking from the front, but makes the phone look a bit like a coffin from the rear.

Before we dig deeper, let's take a look at some MS Smartphone basics. Though the user interface and applications look similar to those on Pocket PC, this is not a Pocket PC. It lacks a touch screen (all navigation is handled using the d-pad and keypad) and MS Smartphones generally run on slower processors (though the T-Mobile MDA and Cingular 8125 Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones happen to run on the same CPU as the SDA). Smartphones' phone ergonomics are very good and are in fact on par with many ordinary feature phones. What makes the phone smart? It can sync to Outlook on Windows desktops, browse "regular" HTML web sites, not just WAP, you can install Windows Mobile smartphone 3rd party applications on the device, and access multiple email accounts using the included Messaging application with strong support for business standards including MS Exchange. It's a phone first, but a modest PDA second.