Last month, AT&T Wireless started offering the Motorola MPx200 which is the first cell phone to utilize the Smartphone OS design here in the United States.
Quote from the review:
“I truly wanted to like this phone. I absolutely loved the look and feel of the MPx200. It had the form factor that I desired and the syncing abilities that a PocketPC user was familiar with. However, at the end of the day – it failed to deliver on both the mobile phone experience and the PDA experience. It’s not to say that the applications provided on the Microsoft Smartphone are horrible. It’s actually quite the contrary – the various programs and utilities are useful and well thought out. However, the slow performance of the Smartphone OS coupled with the poky processor that Motorola uses for the MPx200 makes for a dreadful user experience. Despite the rich feature set that Microsoft delivers with the Smartphone OS, it all boils down to performance. A basic cell phone is ultimately about having real time accessibility to something as simple as a phonebook – and to that end this phone and OS fails to deliver. Phone number lookups are slow, application execution times are slow and the Operating System hangs every so often – all of which is unacceptable. There are definitely many pros to the MPx200 but the cons weigh in even more. Thus anyone considering this phone should wait for version 2 or 3 before Microsoft gets it right. Perhaps the new Samsung phone being offered by Verizon will change all of that but I’m not holding my breath. Go ahead and take a look at the MPx200 – there’s a lot to like but there’s even more to dislike. As is the case for much of Microsoft’s product offerings – wait a few versions before jumping in. In the meantime get the PalmOne Treo 600 if you want a near perfect convergence of the PDA and the cell phone.”
