In the latest Maximum PC magazine, they published the latest coverage maps of the United States and believe or not, T-Mobile has the best coverage now! Better than Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint!
I have always had good reception with T-Mobile regardless of which city I have visited. I even went to Mexico on a mission trip two years ago and while it was expensive to use their Mexican cellular partner, I had no problems with both voice and data access during my week long stay.
INTERNET ON YOUR LAPTOP
As far as utilizing the Wing as an internet device to service a laptop, the Wing actually does it quite well. But they do it differently than the MDA. It took me a call to the Data Team at T-Mobile to figure it out but once they told me I felt stupid that I did not figure it out for myself. Here is how it works:
1) You pair the Wing with the laptop (normal deal, no surprises there). NOTE: If you want to use ActiveSync over bluetooth, initiate the pairing by going into ActiveSync on the Wing and choose sync over Bluetooth. This is the best way to get the pairing to enable ActiveSync over bluetooth.
2) Search for BT devices on your laptop and double click on the
Pocket PC (It actually shows up as a "Smart Phone" rather than PDA). You will notice that there is NO Dialup Networking service (don't panic, its okay)
3) Now, from the Wing, go to Accessories to find the icon for Internet Sharing. Execute that and choose bluetooth from the pulldown and the click CONNECT.
4) You should see a new network device on your laptop for Blutooth Network or PAN at 700kb or something like that. You have now created a "PAN" -- Personal Area Network between your Wing and your laptop. The laptop sees your Wing as another networked device in the PAN which serves as your Internet Gateway!
Surf the web! You are good to go!
Notes:
1) you cannot activesync while the PAN is active. But once you disable the Internet Sharing on your Wing, you should be able to initiate an ActiveSync from the Wing over Bluetooth.
2) incoming calls do not shut down the PAN -- it just prevents internet access during the call. Once the call has finished, surfing continues.
3) Internet Sharing must be running for the PAN to function so once it is started, you might want to go to Start->Today to put it in the background. You can do other stuff on the Wing while Internet Sharing is active.
Last thing: use this same program for Internet access while connected via the USB Cable. Just select USB instead of Bluetooth from the Internet Sharing app. When done in this manner, you will see a Bluetooth Network connection on your laptop at 10mb connection speed.
PERFORMANCE
I used the iPaq 6315 and the MDA and I think the Wing actually performs faster than both of them. With the MDA, there was a significant lag time when accessing the calendar from the today screen. On the Wing, it is about 1 second from 'click' to 'display'. Very nice! The keyboard is much nicer to use and you don't have that 'I gotta be careful or its gonna slip from my fingers' feel now.
WM6
There are lots of things with WM6 that I like. Email is definitely better and TMo has a better wizard for setting up email accounts on the device. Also, I find that I do not need a program launcher like Handyswitcher because I can set the OK button to operate the way I like -- to actually close down the program rather than minimize it (and there is a 'stop all' option now).
While there is no Comm Manager button, the Comm Manager is still there and TMO provides a Today plug-in that takes up one line where you can easily bring up the Comm Manager (as well as see the current date). Very handy.
BATTERY LIFE
It seems about the same as the MDA. I use my Wing often throughout the day for phone calls, email, calendaring, and misc stuff from 9AM to 6:30pm without it being on a charger or plugged into USB. The battery indicator never even loses one bar! I am good to go unless I carry on a 1 hour phone conversation or I stay online with Internet Sharing for hours. (If you are going to do Internet Sharing, keep it plugged in).
BTW: if you have the emergency charger thing for your MDA, it will work perfectly with your Wing. The only MDA items that don't work with the Wing are the chargers because the mini-USB is a little off-center so they don't line up. But USB cables and such are good to go
CASES
I hate the case that comes with the Wing. It is just like the standard MDA case. I am patiently waiting for third party vendors to come up with cases for the Wing.
SPEAKER
Mono speaker? What's up with that? Its fine for speakerphone but sucks for music. Stick with your iPod for music unless you want to use the headphone jack that comes with the device which plugs into the USB port. At least they were nice enough to provide a 2-fer jack so you can plug in the headphones AND a charging device.
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