Review: T-Mobile Vario (HTC Wizard)

By budda on Sunday, June 4th, 2006 comments

It's been a good few years since the first HTC smartphone was released as the Orange SPV (here in the UK). Having since moved to the Sony Ericsson P900 I decided Microsoft Windows Smartphones needed a second chance in the form of the T-Mobile MDA Vario handset.

T-Mobile are currently offering a package deal with the Co-Pilot Live 6 satellite navigation software and hardware. I figured this was worth a shot.

The MDA Vario (or HTC Wizard) hardware is great, the size is near enough the same as the SE P900 - yet it packs a full QWERTY keyboard hidden away inside it. The weight feels about the same, and it fits in the pocket just as well as the SE P900.

Everything about the phone is really nice, it looks smart, feels good in the hand and isn't too fiddly to press all the buttons.

The keyboard is very comfortable and a really nice improvement from previous smartphones I've used on a day to day basis.

It's also got all the connectivity you could want - Bluetooth, GPRS and WiFi. Although T-Mobile lock the phone to 11Mbps (b) you can remove this limiter with a registry tweak to get full 54Mbps (g) rates. It is worth noting your mobile's battery is going to drain quicker.

With all the potential of this smartphone I opted for the T-Mobile "web'n'walk" deal for unlimited data over GPRS. The Vario doesn't support 3G network speeds (a slight downfall of it).

All sounds great so far, but there's one major downfall - the operating system is slow. Too slow. Annoyingly slow. I was frustrated after 1 day of use.

If you want to quickly do something like check a website, or flick through your calendar the handset quickly gets drowned in button presses and the screen stops updating and things turn in to a mess of partial windows.

Another example is getting in your car and starting Co-Pilot sat nav software. It takes ages to kick in! I got to the point where I just could not be bothered to enter the destination details because the phone it just too slow and un-responsive.

It's a real let down. Although this could be blamed on the Microsoft Windows Mobile 2005 operating system, at the same time this Vario hardware is only packing a rather weak 195Mhz processor. Most iPaq PDA's are packing twice that!

So to conclude. Avoid the HTC Wizard based phones - they're too slow. This includes the T-Mobile Vario, O2 XDA mini S, Orange M3000, i-mate K-Jam, Cingular 8125 / 8100, Qtek 9100 and probably many other names around the world. It is probably a good improvement over previous Microsoft powered smartphones, but it's still not usable on a day to day basis.

If you like hacking around and experimenting - you might like it, there's always a small sense of satisfaction with finding ways to improve the phone. Overclocking the CPU to 240Mhz using OMAPclock and Smartskey app offered a small amount of joy as it improved the start up time of Co-Pilot!

Avoid.