Best T-Mobile Phone that syncs street addresses?

by philg

Folks:

My T-Mobile MDA, which was much unloved for its reliance on the stylus, seems to have failed. Now I would like to solicit opinions on the best T-Mobile phone that has as many of the following features as possible…

  • syncs street addresses as well as phone numbers from Microsoft Outlook (requirement)
  • full keyboard for text/email
  • flip phone (open to answer; close to hang up; this one seems very tough to find lately)
  • good Web browser, ideally the capability of running Java so that I can run the Gmail mobile client
  • Bluetooth

Thanks.

[Resolution: I bought a Motorola KRAZR, which seemed like the least bad current T-Mobile offering. It works pretty well as a phone (flip open to answer; flip close to hang up!). To sync it to my Outlook contacts and calendar required spending about $40 on extra software (a 100 MB download; more software than was probably required to run all the U.S. airlines circa 1985). The sync software did a moderately poor job, leaving out birthdays (recurring events) and leaving out contacts that were pure businesses with no person’s name attached. The calendar function isn’t very useful. One gets reminders of imminent events but I can’t find a way to see “what am I doing tomorrow?” Google’s gmail Java download doesn’t seem to work, but maybe that is because I don’t have the right T-Mobile data plan (still recovering from paying them $1.50/minute for phone calls made/received in Southern Africa). Looking up contacts is cumbersome compared to the Microsoft phone software. If you sort your contacts by first name, you can only look people up by first name. If you key in a last name, the software won’t find the contact. Maybe there is hope for Apple’s iPhone, mostly thanks to the sloppy engineering of the incumbents.]

12 thoughts on “Best T-Mobile Phone that syncs street addresses?”

  1. Phil,

    It may seem an odd choice given the “hip” marketing of the device, but I’ve found the SideKick 3 to be a tremendous value and an absolute joy to use.

    There is an outlook sync application available (but I’m not sure of the requirements as I haven’t used it personally). You might also want to consider bluetooth syncing.

    The full keyboard is HUGE in comparison to pretty much every other phone out there.

    It’s not a flip phone form factor, so this is out. But the UI is coherent and usable enough that I’ve never found it to be a problem.

    The web browser is pretty solid, and the wide screen aspect ration makes most websites tolerable. You can access the mobile web based version of g-mail through this, do POP or IMAP or some mix of these (I’m forwarding my “corporate” email address to GMail, then have GMail filters to selectively forward items to my SideKick. I setup the sidekick to send emails with a reply-to as my “corporate” email address and everything works well).

    Hope this helped.

  2. Nokia E62. Meets all those requirements other than flip. Also benefits from wifi and VoIP, if such things interest you.

  4. Blackberry. I have the 8700 and I love it. It just works the way you would expect. Some people don’t like the browser, but I like it. You can also download Opera for the browser.

  5. I have had pretty much every kind of phone and provider for the past ten years, but to me the best by far is the BlackBerry.

    I also think will hard to find a flip phone with full keyboard.

  6. I dont think they have a flip that meets your requerments.

    A good *very solid* smartphone would be one of the blackberry models (Perl for decent looks, 8700 for the full keyboard.)

  7. I’m inclined to throw in another vote for the Blackberries. I have an 8800 and it is absolutely brilliant. The design and implementation of every feature is so well thought out that every aspect of the phone ends up being extremely intuitive and comfortable to use.

    I guess when you design a phone to be used by busy executives for 16 hours a day you end up with a better result than when you design a phone to be used by teenagers to play annoying ring tones and SMS each other.

    So, the Blackberry 8800 would meet all your requirements perfectly except for the flip phone one – unfortunately Blackberry don’t have any flip models.

  8. I’d have to say: Either a Blackberry (8800 has GPS!) or a Nokia E61. E61i has a camera. E62 does not have WiFi, AFAIK. E6x has an excellent browser (based on WebKit, the same open source project Apple’s Safari is based on). A native version of lots of good native software available, native Opera browser available, also runs Java.

    I just came back from a geek conference (crowd of 250 from 22 countries) in Ireland. Obviously, most corporate employee-type folks and owner of *real* companies had Blackberries. Very many had the latest models. The more freelancer-ish types mostly had the Nokia E6x.

    You owe it to yourself to try one of these. Quit messing around with the toys, get a geek tool 😉

  9. Oh, I forgot a couple of things: Flip phones are so 1990s. Both Blackberries and Nokia E6x can automatically lock their keyboards after a certain time. (E61 requires free add-on software, don’t know about the others).

    None of these have (or need!) a stylus.

  10. I have been using the HTC 3125 phone for a while — its not bad and I think you can configure it the way you mentioned.

  11. I’m surprised no one here mentioned the T-Mobile Dash. It’s the only phone in the US right now to run Windows Mobile 6.0 (via an upgrade downloadable from the T-Mobile website). Although not a flip-phone, it’s alternative form factor is so good that I don’t miss the flip-phone style.

  12. Just FYI Phil, T-Mobile does not allow the Gmail Java program to work on its phones. Why, I have NO idea, but it’s made checking my mail that much harder.

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