T-Mobile Shadow Cell Phone Review - Software

Alfredo Padilla
Published on November 21, 2007 Comment on this

OS (8.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow runs Windows Mobile Standard, which unlike Windows Mobile Professional devices like the HTC Touch or Mogul lack a touch screen. Standard devices also have a couple of other differences to differentiate them from the Professional line, for example you can't create new documents using Office Mobile on Standard devices. We think this attempt to differentiate the two "types" of Windows Mobile is a little silly, we would much prefer to see the full range of functionality available, just sans touch screen. That being said Windows Mobile Standard is still a very capable operating system, we actually find getting around in Windows Mobile Standard easier than its Professional counterpart, which should make picking the phone up and just using it easier than it would be on the Touch or Mogul.

Home Screen Score (9.0)

The T-Mobile Shadow's home screen is different from what we've seen on any other Windows Mobile Standard device before. We would expect to see the the traditional Windows Mobile Today screen, with a line of recently used applications at top and various plugins for viewing profile, calendar and messaging information. Instead on the T-Mobile Shadow we get a very slick tabbed interface that gives you access to a few core functions. We have to admit that at first glance we were skeptical as we haven't been impressed by custom home screens on Windows Mobile devices before, but the Shadow's home screen is actually remarkably well thought out and useful.

The home screen on the Shadow has a line of icons along the left side, each of which is a tab that opens a different interface on the right. The tabs are MyFaves, notifications, messaging, calendar, internet, media player, pictures and settings. Under each tab there are a few pages of items that can be accessed using left/right on the D-Pad or by rotating the scroll wheel. These tabs give you access to various functions, for example in the messaging tab the pages give you access to your text messages and various email accounts. In addition the right soft key changes dynamically depending upon what tab or even page you're looking at. What this means that you can get quick access to a huge number of phone functions right from your home page, almost obviating the need to go looking in the Start menu.

We think this is a great home screen interface and believe it will help first time users get better access to various phone functions. Our only concern is that we wish the home screen were more customizable, but of course power users looking for more customization can go find any one of a variety of programs that give you more powerful home screen interfaces.

Extensibility (7.0)
Running Windows Mobile Standard the T-Mobile Shadow is a very extensible platform. Not only are there thousands of native third party applications available for installation, T-Mobile and HTC have also thoughtfully included a java virtual machine so you can run any one of the thousands of java applications available. We would have liked to see support for java applications built into the OS like on Symbian Series 60 devices, but the virtual machine at least allows you access to these programs. The end result is that you want to extend the Shadow's functionality you will likely find an application that does exactly what you want.

Customizability (3.0)
The T-Mobile Shadow is not as customizable as we would have liked. You do have a choice of home screens, including the ability to get a more traditional Windows Mobile Standard home screen if you wish. You can also change the system font size to large if you are having trouble reading items on the screen. Sounds are very customizable using the profile system, and you can create new profiles as well. What's missing is the ability to change the whole look and feel of the device via themes and more discrete control over the home screen, both of which you find on Windows Mobile Professional devices like the T-Mobile Wing or HTC Touch. We also didn't like that something as simple as re-ordering the applications in the Start menu requires some serious hackery, by contrast Symbian Series 60 devices like the Nokia N95 allow you to do this easily.

OS Responsivness (7.0)
We found the T-Mobile Shadow to be a very fairly responsive device. It's not as good as the iPhone or some BlackBerry devices but it's amongst the better Windows Mobile devices we've reviewed. We are very happy to say that it's nowhere near as laggy as the T-Mobile Wing, which was almost unusable at times. We were also happy to see that the MyFaves interface didn't seem to have as serious an effect on performance as we saw with the BlackBerry Curve 8320, where it had a discernible impact on responsiveness. Thanks to the 128 MB of RAM on board you should also be able to run several applications at the same time without a major impact on performance.

Browser Features (8.0)

The T-Mobile Shadow uses Internet Explorer Mobile for web browsing, which is typical on Windows Mobile Standard devices. Internet Explorer Mobile does a reasonable job of handling web standards and technologies. You can view both regular HTML pages and mobilized WAP pages with the browser. Javascript is supported as are frames, pictures, cookies and encryption. What isn't supported are more advanced web technologies like Flash and Java, nor is there RSS or password management on board. Still, most mobile browsers don't support these kind of advanced features, and Internet Explorer Mobile does a better job than most web browsers on cell phones.

Browsing Interface (7.0)

Where Internet Explorer Mobile lags behind a little is in the browsing interface. Although it does as well as most mobile web browsers with three different viewing modes and a full screen mode it doesn't give you the feeling that you're using a real web browser like you get with Safari on the iPhone or Web on Series 60 devices. If you want to view a web page the way it's displayed on your desktop you will be doing a ton of scrolling, and unlike those other two web browsers there's no way to zoom out and get an overview of the page. Frankly Microsoft has put almost no development effort into Internet Explorer Mobile over the past couple of years and others have zoomed right on by them as a result.

Aside from this criticism Internet Explorer Mobile does a reasonable job. The menus are fairly intuitive, although we wish that there weren't so many nested functions. History and bookmarks are straightforward and simple to use, and thankfully you can change a bookmarks folder on the Standard version of Windows Mobile, something you inexplicably can't do on the Professional version. But the lack of advanced features like tabbed browsing and a overview mode do detract from what is otherwise a solid web browser.

Browser Access (5.00)
To see how easy it is to browse to a web site on the T-Mobile Shadow we count the number of steps it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have browsed to our website. We use steps here rather than a timed test because we don't want network issues to effect the test. We count entering the web address as a single step. We found that the T-Mobile Shadow took eight steps to browse to our site, which is a little on the slow side. You can see below that three of our comparison phones did better on this test than the T-Mobile Shadow did. We actually found that on the Shadow it's faster to access the web browser via the Start menu than to use the internet tab on the home screen, so instead of scrolling down four tabs and then hitting the center select key to launch the browser, we just hit the start button, opened the slider and hit the 7 button to launch Internet Explorer Mobile.

Cell Phone	Steps	Score
T-Mobile Shadow	8	5.00
HTC Touch on Sprint	7	5.71
BlackBerry Curve 8320	11	3.64
Razr2 V9m on Verizon	9	4.44
Helio Ocean	5	8.00
T-Mobile Wing	5	8.00

Gaming (5.0)

Like most Windows Mobile phones the T-Mobile Shadow comes with two games built in, Solitaire and Bubble Breaker. Both games are pretty decent and can help you kill some time during a commute, but neither is particularly compelling. We are a little concerned about the Shadow's controls for game play. Although the D-pad holds up pretty well we are worried that the built in scroll wheel might lead to occasional mistakes. We also found that when trying to hit the soft keys we often mistakenly pressed the home or back buttons. There are a wide variety of games that you can install on the Shadow, from native third party applications to java games.

Calculator (6.0)

The calculator on the T-Mobile Shadow is pretty decent, although it lacks the wide variety of advanced features we found on the Curve or the Palm Centro, it does give you access to some advanced functions like square root, 1/x and percentages. There are also memory functions on board, but for the most part it's just your basic arithmetic calculator. If you need a more powerful calculator we're sure you can find one from a third party. It does have the benefit of being easy to use, the arithmetic functions are assigned to the D-Pad while you use the keyboard to enter numbers. More advanced functions are located in a menu under the left soft key.

Alarm (1.0)
The alarm on Windows Mobile Standard phones has traditionally been pretty atrocious and nothing's changed on the Shadow with regards to this. Unlike Windows Mobile Professional devices that allow you to create up to three different alarms with advanced recurrence options and custom sounds for each, all you can do on the Shadow is set a time for the alarm to go off and then turn it on or off. If it's on it will go off at that time every day, if it's off it won't. If you actually use your phone as an alarm clock we recommend you go out and get a third party alternative for the alarm.

Document Software (5.0)

Unlike previous versions of Windows Mobile Standard devices those that are running the latest 6.0 version of Windows Mobile come with the full Office Mobile suite for document handling. This software allows you to view or edit Word and Excel files while PowerPoint files can be viewed but not edited. Adobe Reader has also been included to allow you to view PDF files. Our only concern about the software is the inexplicable decision to keep users from creating new Word and Excel documents. It seems that Microsoft wanted to create some differentiation between the office suites on Windows Mobile Standard versus the Professional version, but this seems a strange a capricious way to do it. First of all it's so easy to get around it's almost laughable, just put a blank Word and Excel document on your device, then when you want to create a new document just open these files up and use the "save as" command to save them as a new document. The question is why would Microsoft go out of their way to force users to such a workaround? We don't know, but we don't like it, as such we are only awarding half the points we normally would for document editing.

Other Software (3.0)

In addition to the software we've already discussed the T-Mobile Shadow has a few other useful programs installed that we think are worthy of a couple points. First is the file browser that allows you to easily move, copy and otherwise manipulate files on the device. Our only annoyance was the inability to select multiple files to be copied or moved. The Shadow also has the Live Search application, which allows you to look up maps, directions and do local searches. Finally the Windows Live application gives you access to various Windows Live services.

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