The stylish T-Mobile Shadow

The first T-Mobile Shadow, released in 2007, was a stylish, bronze-colored "slider" phone—a 20-button keypad slid out of the bottom of the phone, allowing the phone to have a larger screen than some comparable phones. The new T-Mobile Shadow, released in late 2008, is sometimes called the T-Mobile Shadow II to differentiate it from the previous model. It maintains the same basic design as the first version: This Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard, non-touch screen smartphone also has a 20-button keypad that slides out from the bottom. It has a bright, crisp, 2.6-inch QVGA (240 x 320) display and a 2-megapixel camera (no flash). Although the phone has morphed from bronze to burgundy in color, it still has the striking looks that make it as much of a fashion accessory as a phone. The T-Mobile Shadow II retained the customized Home screen of its predecessor, allowing quick access to the most commonly used functions. It's a great-looking phone, both in terms of hardware and software.

The T-Mobile Shadow II is well-balanced and comfortable to hold—it feels great in your hand. The 1100 mAh (Milliamp Hour) battery offers seven hours of talk time and almost seven days of standby time. Those numbers are higher than many other Windows Mobile smartphones on the market because the T-Mobile Shadow II isn't a 3G phone—it's a quad-band GSM phone (850/900/1800/1900). This means it will work on any GSM network in the world, but when it comes to data transfer, the phone is limited to EDGE/GPRS speeds. For basic e-mail, that's fast enough, but if you're keen on watching streaming video or using your phone for advanced online services, you may want to look at a 3G phone.

Performance-wise, the T-Mobile Shadow II is middle of the road—it has a 260 MHz CPU, which is one of the slower mobile phone processors on the market today, but with 128 MB of RAM, it has enough memory to run almost any software you want. Given the speed of the CPU, it is somewhat surprising that the T-Mobile Shadow II feels quite snappy moving from program to program—especially on the customized Home screen. There's about 140 MB of space on the phone for data storage, and it's expandable with microSDHC cards—all the way up to the current maximum of 16 GB of storage. When I used the T-Mobile Shadow II as my phone for a few days, it worked very well. I synchronized it with my hosted Microsoft Exchange account, installed Windows Live Search (which is useful even without GPS on the phone), and I was good to go. Other than my lack of skill at T9 text entry (I prefer QWERTY-style keyboards), I had zero complaints using it. I found the battery life to be impressive, given that I left Wi-Fi on for several days. And because it uses a standard mini-USB plug for charging, it was easy to charge no matter where I was.

One of the key differentiating features in the T-Mobile Shadow II is the built-in 802.11.b/g Wi-Fi. This makes up for the lack of 3G in some situations—if you want to watch streaming video and you're within range of your Wi-Fi network, you're set. This also makes the phone great for traveling because you can hop on open Wi-Fi networks to check your e-mail or to look something up online. T-Mobile also uses the Wi-Fi signal for a service they call HotSpot@Home, which allows you to make unlimited voice calls over Wi-Fi when you're outside network range or when you just want to save your minutes.

The Home screen is also different from most Windows Mobile smartphones on the market—the original T-Mobile Shadow was the first phone to use the sliding panel Home screen design that's now common on Windows Mobile 6.1 phones. Although the sliding panel Home screen is no longer unique to the T-Mobile Shadow, the functionality on this new model is richer than most competing products. Also worth noting is a subtle hardware enhancement that I haven't seen on other slider phones: When you slide the keyboard shut, the phone locks, and the screen dims. When you slide the keyboard open, it unlocks the phone, and the screen turns on. The same functions work for phone calls: Sliding the keyboard shut ends a call, and sliding it open picks up an incoming call.

So, who's the ideal user for the T-Mobile Shadow II? I'd say anyone who is comfortable with T9-style text entry and who wants a durable and attractive Windows Mobile smartphone—all without breaking the bank. The new T-Mobile Shadow is available (at the time this article was written) from T-Mobile for U.S.$149 with a two-year contract. There's really no Windows Mobile smartphone that looks quite like it on the market today, so if you're the kind of person who likes to make a statement with your phone, the T-Mobile Shadow II is worth your consideration.