A fully-fledged sat nav system and more…
A fully-fledged sat nav system and more…
T-Mobile’s MDA Compact III joins an elite band of phones with built-in GPS that turns your handset into a fully-fledged sat nav system. But does it beat its dedicated rivals?
We’re going to see more phones with built-in GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers, but at the moment there are only a handful doing the rounds. These include the Benefon Twig, Mio A701, O2 Xda Orbit, HTC P3300, the upcoming Nokia N95 and, of course, T-Mobile’s MDA Compact III. The convenience of having a GPS receiver embedded into the phone is obvious and edges these smartphones closer to challenging the functionality of their dedicated sat nav adversaries.T-Mobile’s MDA Compact III is the latest flame in the operator’s Windows-powered MDA Compact smartphone series, and arrives bundled with CoPilot’s Live 6 Pocket PC sat nav solution. Of course, this package is exclusive to T-Mobile and initial pricing is £60 on the Flext 35 (£35 per month), plus the Web’n’Walk £7.50 tariffs (£42.50 a month). For the £7.50 supplement, Web’n’Walk offers unlimited webbrowsing.
Lower down this review, you’ll see our verdict on the CoPilot software and its sat nav performance, but for now, we’ll concentrate on the smartphone itself. As the name suggests, this smartphone is very compact for a PocketPC handset and compared to T-Mobile’s Vario range, it’s extremely pocket-friendly, although it’s quite wide and will still cause a slight bulge in the trouser pouch. However, at 16.8mm thick, it’s relatively trim and is by far the most stylish of T-Mobile’s range. It also sports a lovely grey tactile soft paint finish.
Powered by the latest Windows 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition OS, the user interface is T-Mobile-flavoured but doesn’t deviate much from past Windows PocketPC user interfaces.
The MDA Compact III offers three navigation techniques: a stylus-driven touch-screen; a trackwheel and a trackball (the last two are for one-handed operation). Touch-screen navigation works well and is more efficient and accurate, but for users who get frustrated at continually clamouring for the stylus, the alternatives are quite effective. The silver scroll may feel a bit loose, but it clicks along nicely and is perfect for trawling quickly through text and vast lists. The trackball is a new method, recently employed on the BlackBerry 8100 Pearl handset and is essentially a loose-fitted half-ball that responds to a brush or nudge from your thumb. It takes time to gauge its sensitivity (or lack of), but you may find yourself resorting to the other two methods at first. Stick with it, though, and you’ll soon master its sometimes skittish manner.
Dedicated buttons for firing up the sat nav application and accessing the Web’n’Walk browser sit on the front control panel. The full HTML internet browser works well on the Compact III’s sizeable 2.8-inch screen and you can switch to landscape mode for more comfortable surfing. 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity are conspicuous by their absence, so it’s left to EDGE technology to download the web pages and access email at brisk speeds. It seems a strange move from T-Mobile to omit 3G and especially Wi-Fi. HTC and O2 have similar models with the P3300 and Xda Orbit that both pack built-in Wi-Fi (it’s worth noting that HTC manufactures both the MDA Compact III and Xda Orbit). Wi-Fi connectivity plays an increasingly bigger role in mobile communications with the advent of VoIP, so it’s criminal that T-Mobile has dropped it, let alone excluded 3G as well.
As you would expect from a Windows-run smartphone, the MDA Compact III offers the full PIM functionality suite and synchronisation of your calendar, contacts and task with Outlook on your PC. The Windows 5.0 OS also integrates push-email capabilities and a new backup facility that, unlike past Windows smartphones, doesn’t lose data when the battery runs dry. Setting up your push-email still relies on you knowing your server settings and manually inputting them. This procedure isn’t really that intuitive, especially for the first timer.
For the serious business ally, a full complement of Microsoft Windows Office applications, including Word Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile and Excel Mobile, is on hand. You can create and edit Word and Excel but this doesn’t stretch to PowerPoint where you can only read documents. For writing long emails, Word or Excel documents, a virtual keyboard appears on screen and it’s pretty straightforward, if a little slow, to operate via a stylus.
It may not concern the strict business type, but a two-megapixel camera is available for photos and recording video footage. The shutter button sits on the side, so you hold the phone in landscape form to take pictures. The large display moonlights as a great viewfinder and the shutterbug shoots in a standard 1600×1200-pixel resolution. There’s no flash, but you can alter the brightness and lighting conditions on screen using the stylus, which proves an exasperating experience especially if you want to take a quick snap. The picture quality is in line with most other two-megapixel camera, so you might get the odd photo worth printing, but otherwise it’s pretty standard.
Leaving out Wi-Fi may prove to be an oversight, especially when you can get the same device (only cosmetically different) with Wi-Fi and CoPilot sat nav software on O2’s Xda Orbit. Still, if Wi-Fi and 3G aren’t a consideration and you’re in the market for a sat nav smartphone, then T-Mobile’s sleek MDA Compact III can’t be faulted.
Drive time
3G has used ALK’s CoPilot Live 6 sat nav solution on the Symbian-based Nokia N70 before, and its Windows solution runs pretty much along the same lines. As you already know, the T-Mobile MDA Compact III has a built-in GPS receiver (its SIRF 3 chip is the best around at this level), so you don’t have to worry about connecting to an extra Bluetooth receiver.
To get started, insert the 256MB microSD card, which contains the software and street-level mapping for Ireland and the UK. The slot is located behind the battery, so if you need to swap cards frequently, it’s a bit of a bind. You also receive extra discs of mapping for western European major roads, but you will have to load these via the PC to another microSD card (you can pick up a 1GB card for £15 at www.mymemory.co.uk).
You can navigate to your desired destination in a number of ways using any address (with icons for home, work, favourites, recent journeys and saved trip). You can use stored contacts, its millions of stored POIs (Points of Interest) and any UK seven-digit postcode. You can pick a point on the map, or enter a latitude/longitude location. If your journey takes you via different destinations, you can plan an itinerary, adding stops and setting alarms for welcome breaks if you get tired over the long drive. And for peace of mind, you can preview the route before embarking. You can also programme CoPilot to take the quickest or shortest route possible and to avoid major roads
Getting a GPS fix from a cold start takes a couple of minutes, but this improves over time and you can even pick up satellites in urban canyons. The CoPilot Live 6 software offers 2D or 3D map views and very helpful ‘distance to next turn’ icons in the corner of the screen to prepare drivers. These also appear full-screen in the Driver Safety mode. The turn-by-turn voice instructions are audible, but you will need to maximise the volume to hear it over the noisier motorway environment.
You receive a free two-year subscription to the Live Traffic update service that’s relayed to your phone via GPRS connection. This is worth noting because you pay for unlimited web access with the Web’n’Walk tariff, so you won’t be stung with hidden GPRS data charges. The traffic data is provided by ITIS (www.itis.com.my). If you receive news of an accident or traffic jam, it will give you the option of re-routing around the offending incident. Similarly, if you take a wrong turn or detour, CoPilot will automatically get you back on course.
When navigating to your destination, this phone solution works well, although one annoying setback is the touch-screen’s lack of sensitivity when using your fingers. Each time you want to change your settings, you need to use the stylus. This a bit fiddly when it’s mounted on the supplied bracket. Along with the sturdy car screen-mounting bracket, you also get an in-car charger.
Other great features include the London congestion warning zone, walking mode so you can be guided around city streets and a live tracking and messaging service that lets friends and family monitor your progress from ALK’s website.
The T-Mobile MDA Compact III, together with Co-Pilot Live 6, is a tidy package, delivering a feature- rich sat nav solution that goes some way to challenging dedicated sat nav systems like the TomTom Go and Navman iCN range. However, the Windows OS sometimes make pre-journey planning and operation slow while the touch-screen usability issue can grate. It just falls short but it’s not far off TomTom et al.
Even the financial 
