My new MDA Vario!

Got my T-Mobile contract today - the Flext 35 with Web 'n' Walk, with a 25% discount :-) I was going to get the MDA Compact II, but no-one had stock (except for one place that only had the pink one, which I wasn't too keen on). It turns out that this was a good thing - luckily one store said, "But we've got stock of the Vario", which I hadn't known was available on the special.

The Vario is basically, as far as I can see, the same as the Compact, except that it has wireless support (yay!) and a full qwerty slideout keyboard (double yay!). It's the same size as the Compact, except that it's a bit thicker. I was worried that it would be too big to actually use as a phone, but it's actually not that much bigger than my current Motorola V300 - certainly not as big as my Treo, which is what I was picturing. So it won't be embarrasing talking into a huge gadget :-)

It's not 3G, unfortunately, and some reviews say that it can be a bit sluggish since the processor is a bit slow, but I'm not too concerned (haven't tried it yet, though). And the battery isn't great - 8 days standby, only 3 hours talktime. But I'll just put it on charge overnight, so it's not a big issue either.

I'll probably post some pictures at some point (comparing to my V300, and my Nokia Coolpix P1), but in the meantime there's a fairly good review with pics here.

It's got Windows Mobile 5.0 as an OS, and comes with the Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, Powerpoint Mobile, integrated Zip, Clearvue PDF viewer, and Outlook. Oh, and MediaPlayer, and of course, Pocked IE. Even better, for me, it comes with Pocket MSN, so when my internet connection is flaky at home, or during my lunch hour at work, I can sign into MSN on my phone! With the web'n'walk package, I get unlimited internet, so I don't even have to worry about how much bandwidth I'm using. And I can check my gmail during lunchtimes too :-)

Not 3G, as I mentioned, but it does support GPRS (obviously), bluetooth, wireless, usb, and infrared. The slide out keyboard is awesome (great for text messages, at the very least!) and it has a touch screen as well. What's cool is when you slide out the keyboard, it automatically switches the display and joypad into landscape mode. It also has a 1.3 megapixel camera, which takes video as well. (Yeah, I know all this stuff is pretty standard - but coming from a Motorola V300, I'm quite excited :-). Oh, and as a bonus, when I left the T-Mobile shop, they were handing out T-Mobile stuff, so I got a pen, a keyring, and a squishy stress cube :-)

I was quite impressed that in the box is a charger, usb cable, screen protector sticky thing, and a case as well as earphones (which let you set the volume as well as answer/hang up calls).

This is going to be so cool - finally, something to do on the tube on the way to and from work :-)