You may recall a previous review stating the opposite.

Well, that was a long time ago.  Perhaps I was blinded by my repressed envy of my friends with iPhones.  For now I own a 3G 16g iPhone, and you can consider me among the converted.  If I ever really needed converting, being the Apple nerd I am.

At this point I’m actually glad I waited.  The App Store truly makes the iPhone’s possiblities nearly unlimited.  I’m still blown away by all the things I can do with it.  The app that’s really blown me away is Simplify Media.  This is a free app worth checking out whether you have an iPhone or not.  If you’ve ever worked in an office you are probably familiar with sharing iTunes libraries.  Simplify Media makes this possible with 30 of your friends.  And the true clencher is, with an iPhone, you can listen to your entire iTunes library, OR any one of your friends, from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Just think about that for a second.

Nice, isn’t it?

And BTW, my Dash would randomly and indiscriminately freeze, turn off, or just generally refuse to work.  This was predicted by a friend of mine at about the 6 month mark, and it turned out to be the case.

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My Sidekick 3 decided to not work anymore after being dropped several times, thrown around, and splashed with water or other substances. Disgraceful engineering I’d say.

So I call T-Mobile and they tell me they will either send me a new Sidekick 3 or a T-Mobile Dash. I opted for the Dash. It came in the mail extremely quickly and I was a mildly ecstatic new smart phone owner.

Upon first impressions the phone is nice and compact and nice looking, it’s also nice to touch as it has a rubbery back part area, that is nice to touch. Windows Mobile is probably not the greatest OS ever made, but I already found a hack that enables me to make my Windows Mobile OS look just like OSX, so at least it will look like a stable OS when it crashes and stops working a few months down the road.

The keyboard has small keys, I was really worried about my fat fingers, luckily this hasn’t been a big hindrance. I immediately deactivated the volume touch strip as it is the single ‘feature’ of the fun I would describe as utterly stupidly designed. The volume touch strip is very sensitive by default, and you will find yourself adjusting the volume like every time you breath on the phone, but this is easily rectified.

Reasons the T-Mobile Dash is better than the iPhone:

1. Multimedia Messaging. Dash can, iPhone can’t.

2. I can shoot videos, iPhone can’t.

3. I can beam things to people via Bluetooth. iPhones probably can to but it’s not as easy (we couldn’t get it to work) so ha.

4. The speaker is louder. The speaker is LOUD. Loudest speaker I’ve ever heard on a cell phone type device. The speakerphone is great as well. It is so loud in fact if you are in the car with the windows up and you have your ring set to loud and someone calls you, everyone in the car will hate you as their ears ring and their heads melt.

Having said all this, when my contract with T-Mobile ends next year I will be purchasing an iPhone as I’m sure all that stuff will be fixed.

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