NOVEMBER 30, 2006
Product Review
By Stephen Baker
T-Mobile's Difficult Dash
This multifeatured phone puts form too far above function; even at the lower price, this device left me longing for my BlackBerry
People at the Monaco Media Forum watched as I pulled the phone out of my pocket, and at least five of them had the very same reaction. "Nice form factor," they said. That's geek talk for "great design." The sleek new Dash, from Deutsche Telekom's (DTE) T-Mobile USA, exudes it. Much like a BlackBerry, it's a handset with a full keyboard. But it has a soft, metallic finish, a curve to its profile, and as I place it next to my BlackBerry 8700g on the table, the Dash, at half an inch, is barely two-thirds as thick.
If you like the Microsoft (MSFT) Windows operating system and want a handset that picks up Wi-Fi signals, the Dash might be worth a look. An added incentive: It's priced to move, costing only $199 with a two-year subscription. The data service, including e-mail and instant messaging, costs $29.99 a month. T-Mobile execs say Dash is targeted at users who have so far resisted springing for a smartphone, those do-it-all handhelds that can set you back half a thousand.
Close to Chucking It But for all its strengths, I wouldn't recommend the Dash. To say that I found it a pain to operate is putting it mildly. I can't tell you how many times I cursed at it while traveling in Europe. At least a couple of times, I felt tempted to curl my index finger around its lovely, thin form factor and send it skipping across the Seine or the reflecting pool in the Luxembourg Gardens. Later in the week I bellyached about it to the people at the conference, but they dismissed my complaints. It's just a question of getting used to Windows Mobile, they said. They may have a point. But after two weeks using the phone, wrestling with infuriating controls and sluggish downloads, I returned to my BlackBerry with great relief.
Don't get me wrong. The Dash has features BlackBerry can't match, from a megapixel camera to movie-playing capabilities. A special phone feature allows you to pick five friends (in the United States) on any wireless service and talk to them for free.
Trouble is, though, nearly everything on the Dash was a pain to operate. It took me several attempts before it agreed to accept my mail from Google's (GOOG) Gmail. My luck in getting connections through Wi-Fi has been, at best, mixed. Yahoo! (YHOO) mail never worked on the Dash because I don't have the right kind of enhanced Yahoo account. We could say that's Yahoo's fault. But thanks to an agreement between Yahoo and Research in Motion (RIMM), it's not a problem with my BlackBerry.
Who Has Time? Then there's the issue of speed. To test, I put the Dash and the BlackBerry—both of them T-Mobile phones—side by side for a race to the BusinessWeek.com site. Both of them performed better than usual, but the BlackBerry got there in four seconds, while the Dash took 12. That's the fastest I've ever seen it run.
I tried a follow-up on ESPN.com. The BlackBerry got there in seconds. The Dash was laboriously loading 7 KB, 90KB, 166KB, and then a Script Warning popped up, telling me that a script was causing the machine to work slowly. I couldn't read the rest of the message, because the text was covered by two buttons: Abort or Continue. Then the screen went white, with a blinking command bar at the bottom.
I gave up. Life's too short. The new Dash is sleek, attractively priced, and bursting with potential. But I'll wait for version 2.0.
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