Jan 04 2005
T-Mobile MDA iii for ?25
A small Crewe based company, OneStopPhoneShop, has T-Mobile’s MDA III for ?24.99, with an 18 month contract. That’s around ?125 cheaper than the equivalent from Orange (the SPV M2000) via the Carphone Warehouse’s online e2save brand and ?225 cheaper than O2’s XDA IIs.
In brief, the MDA III is a quad band, wi-fi, Bluetooth, Microsoft Windows for Mobile 2003 device, which looks like a standard Windows PDA but also has 2G/GPRS phone functionality. There are O2 and Orange versions because the device is actually produced by a Hong Kong firm called HTC, and then rebadged by the phone networks.
Fellow LugRadio presenter Stuart (Aq) said he wouldn’t use it because:
a. it’s Microsoft based
b. he prefer specific devices for specific tasks.
I prefer fewer things in my pockets. The Microsoft issue bothers me less than Stuart, simply because there’s no alternative. Stuart mentioned the Palm Treo but I’ve yet to find it at an equivalent price. Anyway, to my knowledge, Palm devices are no less proprietary than Microsoft, so why spend the extra just to end up with a different type of closed system?
It’s unlikely I’m going to go for the deal, simply beacuse T-Mobile’s data charges are extortionate. I don’t use that word lightly: you’re locked into a 12 or 18 month contract and have nowhere else to go, with a device that is made for data. ?7.50 per megabyte is prohibitively expensive and even their data-bundles are more expensive than Orange or O2. At least now we know why they can afford to subsidise the handset so heavily.