T-Mobile Shadow Cell Phone Review - Multimedia

Alfredo Padilla
Published on November 21, 2007 Comment on this

Accessing Music Software (4.08)

To see how easy it is to get music playing on the T-Mobile Shadow we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a song playing. We repeat this test five times and take the average for our score. The T-Mobile Shadow took an average of 4.9 seconds to get a song playing. This is a pretty decent score, you can see below that it's faster than any of our comparison phones. We were helped out on the Shadow by the fact that there is a home screen tab for music that allows you to get a song playing directly instead of having to dig into the applications menus.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	4.9	4.08
HTC Touch on Sprint	7.8	2.56
BlackBerry Curve 8320	7.62	2.62
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	4.96	4.03
Helio Ocean	5.2	3.85
T-Mobile Wing	5.5	3.64

Dedicated Music Controls (1.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow doesn't have any buttons dedicated to music playback. Even the volume buttons only control the phone volume, with music volume being controlled by Windows Media Player Mobile. There is however a home screen plugin that allows you to quickly play and pause music without having to open up the program, and we decided this was worth a point.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (6.2)

The T-Mobile Shadow uses Windows Media Player Mobile to play back music. We've seen this software before of course and it provides pretty solid music playback support. Playlists are supported, however only those that are synced over from Media Player on the desktop appear, you can't use m3u or pls playlist files. Thankfully you can create and edit playlists on the device as well. We were also happy to see that tags for our test Mp3, AAC and WMA files were all recognized by the software.

You can view your music by title, artist, album or genre, but can't search for music. One annoyance when you're viewing music though is that the software divides your music into two libraries, one of music on the device and the other of music on your memory card. We would have much preferred to have all the music regardless of location included in a single unified library. Album art is supported, as are visualizations, ratings, background play and scanning your device for music files. Unfortunately there's no equalizer on board, but we did like the hardware shortucts that can be changed.

Overall Windows Media Player Mobile provides a solid music playing platform, with a good selection of options and features. We did find the implementation of the library a little cludgey and wish that it had an equalizer and recognized our m3u and pls playlist files.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow doesn't support any online music stores that allow you to purchase and download music directly to your phone.

Streaming (2.0)
The Shadow is able to stream Windows Media audio but doesn't support streaming Mp3 or Real audio.

Podcast Support (0.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow doesn't include any software that allows you to directly download or organize podcasts on your device.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
You can easily synchronize music between the T-Mobile Shadow and your PC using Windows Media Player on your PC. This is facilitated by ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Manager to synchronize certain playlists automatically.

Music Formats and DRM (4.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow was able to play back our test Mp3, AAC and WMA music files. It also supports DRM protected music that uses Microsoft's PlaysForSure software. This means you can purchase and play music from a wide variety of online music stores, including Napster and Rhapsody. iTunes protected content is not supported.

Music Interruption (10.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow handles interruptions to its music playback by calls fairly well. When a call comes in the music is paused cleanly and when the call ends it starts back up again. We would liked to have seen a nice fade in/out feature, but this is a minor issue.

Video

Video Software Access (2.24)

To see how easy it is to get a video playing on the T-Mobile Shadow we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a video playing. We do this test five times and take the average for our score. The T-Mobile Shadow took an average of 8.92 seconds to get a video playing. This is on the slow end of the spectrum and we found we were slowed down by the fact that it seemed to take Windows Media Player Mobile quite awhile to load up a video. Also, unlike music that can be started right from the home screen, we needed to actually open Windows Media Player Mobile up and navigate to our video file to get it playing. The end result is that it will take a bit of doing to get a video playing on the T-Mobile Shadow.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	8.92	2.24
HTC Touch on Sprint	8.6	2.33
BlackBerry Curve 8320	8.08	2.48
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	5.24	3.82
Helio Ocean	5.5	3.64
T-Mobile Wing	8.7	2.30

Video Controls (8.0)
When a video is playing in Windows Media Player Mobile you have a good selection of controls. The center select key acts as play/pause while volume can be controlled using the Shadow's scroll wheel or you can use up/down on the D-Pad. Left/right on the D-pad will skip to the next or previous video or if you hold them down will fast forward or rewind in the current video. The left soft key will take you to the current playlist. There are also a couple of keypad shortcuts. The * buttons will allow you to change the videos rating, the # key will mute the video and 0 will toggle full screen mode. We also like the fact that you can reassign the hardware buttons if you wish.

Video Software & Organization (6.0)

As with music video playback on the T-Mobile Shadow is handled by Windows Media Player Mobile. Once again this software does a solid, if unspectacular job. You can scan your device to automatically update your device with all the videos on it, but once again the library is divided in two, something we consider an unnecessary complication. You can rate videos and watch them in full screen. Playlist support is limited to those you sync over from Windows Media on your desktop, but you can create and edit playlists on the device. Your videos are divided into a "My Videos" and "My TV" section, but beyond that there's really no organization options. You can also play videos in the background. For those who are serious video consumers you may want to consider some alternative software like Core Player, but for most users this will be more than sufficient functionality.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
You can easily synchronize videos between your PC and the T-Mobile Shadow using Windows Media Player. Just as with music you can set up playlists to sync automatically.

Video Formats (6.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow supported all three of our 3GP encoded video files. It also supports Windows Media Video, Mpeg-4 and H264 encoded content. It doesn't support Flash, Quicktime or Real video.

Video DRM (5.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow supports video encoded with Microsoft's DRM, for example video purchased from Amazon's Unboxed store. It does not support DRM protected content from iTunes.

Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
To see how well the T-Mobile Shadow can handle video at various bit rates we test five files from 48kbps to 768kbps. We were happy to see that the T-Mobile Shadow was able to play back all of our test videos without problems, even in full screen mode. This means you'll be able to view pretty good quality video on the Shadow.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow does not support any direct video download services.

Video Streaming unscored
We do not score this section as there is really no standard for mobile video streaming, we do however test out a couple of sites for informational purposes. The T-Mobile Shadow was able to play back streaming Windows Media video from windowsmedia.com however it wasn't able to play back streaming 3GP video from Youtube Mobile. It also wasn't able to play back video from www.zoovision.com.

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