Review: T-Mobile Wing has great sound quality

I'm finicky about call quality. In fact, I've rarely lauded a phone's call quality -- until now. In my hands-on experience, the navy blue T-Mobile Wing ($300 with a two-year contract) sounded terrific.

While on calls, I heard virtually none of the telltale hissing or background noise that usually betrays the fact that I'm on a cell phone. And the people I spoke with noted that I sounded very clear -- even while on a noisy jetway at an airport. Call quality isn't the Wing's only strength: It also offers impressive battery life and a strong array of features.

The phone -- the first to ship preloaded with Windows Mobile 6.0 (T-Mobile is also making Windows Mobile 6 available as an upgrade for the Dash) -- has many features, including a still-image and video camera, messaging and the familiar Windows-like menu system with applications to go.

The phone includes Office Mobile with Word, Excel and PowerPoint (you can view, create, and edit documents); Windows Live for Windows Mobile (with Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail, Live Search and Live Spaces); Windows Media Player; and a My Documents folder structure for storing files and multimedia. Other applications include instant messaging (for use with AOL, ICQ and Yahoo), Java applications, a T-Mobile HotSpot log-in shortcut and a voice recorder.

The Wing comes with a 2.8-in. touch-screen display (T-Mobile bundles a stylus with the phone, but I tended to rely on my fingers to do the walking). Six highly responsive buttons and a five-way navigational control beneath the front-screen display make single-handed navigation a breeze. Slide the display left, and the screen automatically reorients itself in landscape view to accompany your typing on the roomy keyboard. The keyboard's keys are wide and flat, with backlighting that makes using the device in a darkened environment a breeze. I found the Wing surprisingly comfortable for thumb typing when I held the device in two hands. As a touch typist, I was surprised at how quickly I could type (I have small hands; a friend with larger hands found the keyboard harder to navigate).

Unfortunately, other aspects of the phone's design are less appealing. Specifically, I found many of the buttons around the perimeter of the phone difficult to press and poorly constructed. For example, the volume slider, located near the middle of the phone, along the left-hand side, was difficult to adjust using the pad of my finger. Iif you have longish nails, this might not be an issue.

The dedicated camera button is located near the top left of the camera when the phone is oriented vertically and at the top right when the phone is situated horizontally -- the optimal way to use the camera. But the button is flat and hard to press. When I did click it, I often accidentally twisted the phone's slider mechanism, too, which makes me worry about the long-term integrity of this critical part of the phone. Pressing the camera button launched the phone's 2-megapixel CMOS digital camera, with its 8x digital zoom (for low-resolution images) and video camera (capable of capturing clips at up to 176- by 174-pixel resolution), but the phone lagged considerably while the camera popped up.