MDA Vario v Compact v SDA3

[Guest gavinlilley]

My t-moible contract is up for renewal.

I currently have the choice of a MDA Vario (£70) or a free MDA Compact II - both with unlimited gprs useage.

If I buy the Compact I will have to add the cost of a sd card wireless card, which dont have any memory these days. Im pretty sure the Vario has this built in.

How do the two phones compare? i hve had a MDA3 and a Comapct in the past and prefered the compact - but Im thinking the vario had many more features.

Does anyone what the SDA3 will be and if its woth waiting for?

[Guest Xenzo1990]

I personally would give the Vario a miss. Ive read some pretty off putting topics about bugs that T-mobile seem to not want to rectify.

SD Card Problems - eg some cards do not get recognised

Rebooting for no apparent reason - Randomly reboots.

Battery Problem - If it runs too low, the charger cable won't charge it.

Something else that makes me think again about the Vario is its slide out keypad. Its all very well and good, but i've seen alot of slide phones/flip phones die before 12 months because of these features not being hardy enough.

[Guest spacerace]

My t-moible contract is up for renewal.

I currently have the choice of a MDA Vario (£70) or a free MDA Compact II - both with unlimited gprs useage.

If I buy the Compact I will have to add the cost of a sd card wireless card, which dont have any memory these days. Im pretty sure the Vario has this built in.

How do the two phones compare? i hve had a MDA3 and a Comapct in the past and prefered the compact - but Im thinking the vario had many more features.

Does anyone what the SDA3 will be and if its woth waiting for?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Unless I'm mistaken the SDA3 is the T-Mobile version of the imate SP5 ?

If so it's very different from either of the PPCPE devices. More of a phone, no touchscreen etc. I personally prefer carrying this to a PDA-phone as it's less bulky, but there's a tradeoff in functionality, so it depends what's best for you.

Out of the Compact II and the Vario, yes the Vario has built in WiFi which is an advantage, but also has the slideout keyboard which is the other major difference. If you're planning on doing a lot of typing (email/im) then the Vario is the better bet. Virtually the same size but a little thicker (depth).

BTW - SanDisk do a nice 256Mb/Wifi combo SDIO card if it helps. I ran with this and the original Compact for a while but always remembering the card was a real pain. I'd much prefer having built in WiFi....

[Guest gavinlilley]

thanks for the advice guys.

I popped into the t-mobile store today and am quite shocked by the size of both the compact and the vario. Neither are that much bigger than my mpx220.

After having two large pda phones, I swapped for a smaller smartphone but now that I have the options of wifi and unlimited gprs I think that smartphone with a lrger screen is the way to go.

Has anyone else had problems with the vario? Is it just a case of a simple rom upgrade?

I agree that flipphones can wear out quickly, but in my expereince the windows phones are all very well made and i had no troubel with the sliding keyboard of my xda.

[Guest spacerace]

I haven't heard many bad reports about the Vario or any of it's variants. The mechanism seemed very solid to me and didn't look like it will be a weak point.

There was a ROM upgrade in about Feb which fixed a few minor things, plus the Push EMail update will be out soon on T-Mobile - if it isn't already (not checked recently).

[Guest Xenzo1990]

VarioII June/July according to another MoDaCo member who seems pretty well in knowledge. So thats probably worth waiting for. However, looking at the comparison of it against the wizard, it is fairly chunkier. Down to the 3g I shall presume. All the VarioII really offers is 3g and probably a better camera.

[Guest bluemonq]

well actually, there's one important difference between the compact and the vario: quadband. if you travel a lot (specificially north america) you'll be better off with the vario in terms of reception. also, if they can get the kinks straightened out, the vario should have a longer battery life - may or may not be important to you depending on your charging habits.

i am not aware of an sda iii, but then i am not aware of many things ;) i have a us sda (an sda ii running windows mobile 5) and it works great for me. am in the process of finding a small bluetooth keyboard for it and am installing a cursor hack for it right now. what i plan on doing is getting a frogpad (one-handed bt keyboard) and hacking it so i can use it on the move; the screen is actually not much smaller than the compact. one benefit is that i don't have to worry so much about the screen, as there is a hard plastic over it (as opposed to the soft plastic on touchscreens).

along that vein, you might consider getting the compact and putting the money you saved from the vario on a frogpad. if you believe you will be using the gprs to its fullest and want a phone *now* off the shelf, go get a vario; the touchscreen and thumboard will be instrumental in getting the most out of unlimited data. from my overseas friends, 3g isn't all it's cracked up to be; you may find yourself dependent more on wi-fi. there are wi-fi sd cards that have onboard memory, but i believe that is limited to only 128 or 256 mb.

oh, and yes, if you're a fan of skype or any other VoIP services, you'll want the compact, unless you're up to some hacking and tweaking: the cpu of the vario can't quite handle skype right out of the box.