vB Easy Archive - Dash vs MDA vs SDA- Which is the best?

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Dash vs MDA vs SDA- Which is the best?
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Posted by: Runwhiteboyrun

I'm the FNG around here, just found this awesome site. My question is, I have the choice of getting any T-Mobile phone for cheap, and have narrowed it down to the three I listed. My question is simply, which is the coolest? Feature/upgrade wise? Best for tips n tricks? Running old game system emulators? All that jazz.. any help would be appreciated.

Posted by: faheja

I would have to say that mda... Im sorry.. but i played with the dash for a while and it just drives me crazy.. i keep hitting buttons on accident.. and it just doesnt seem as customizable as the mda.. the mda is bigger i will admit, but far worth more..

just my opinion

Posted by: dmathis

I have no experience with the MDA, but I had an SDA from February until last week. The Dash is, for me, hands down a better piece of equipment. The phone is better, the camera seems better (although it may be the camera software), and the QWERTY keyboard is nicer to use than the phone keypad.

Just my opinion.

Good Luck.

Posted by: sfu_engineer

Dash sucks on emulators! Dont get the Dash for emu as SNES emulators fail to work and NES emulators fail to display in full screen

Posted by: Dishe

There is no "better" device. Each is the best at a particular thing. Its a matter of preference.
I use my SDA for casual gaming/information/email, and so I hate touchscreens because they are actually harder to use one handed. And more delicate. After breaking 3 or so touch screens, I welcome a smartphone device (for more details on my hatred of touchscreens read this
). You also can't beat the form of the SDA. Its shaped like a phone, not a brick.

Posted by: dmathis

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dishe

There is no "better" device. Each is the best at a particular thing. Its a matter of preference.

There is some great wisdom here. While I really appreciate the added convenience of the QWERTY keyboard, and I find that the landscape screen orientation is much more to my liking, these are both personal preferences. There are three things that I feel are great improvements in the Dash over the SDA. They are:

Much better Comm manager;
I really like the slider bar with the Joggr patch.
Cell phone functionality (This one is a real deal breaker, as a phone with poor coverage is little better than a Palm).

My SDA had a dickens of a time maintaining a signal. It would have three-four bars one minute, and be "Searching..." the next. To get around this and have it find a tower again, I often had to switch to Flight Mode and back (I did try the Cingular ROM update, and this seemed to fix the problem). However T-mobile doesn't have an update for this phone, and from what I read have no intention of providing one. When the techs at T-mobile were unable to help me alleviate this problem, they offered to send me a replacement handset. I asked if they had an alternate to the SDA, since I didn't want to replace what is evidently a system problem with another phone having the same problem, and they said that they'd send me the Dash. I jumped at the offer.

On the other side of the coin, the speaker on the SDA seemed to be much better than on the Dash, and the microphone is definitely better (I use VITO Audio Notes to record session music, and the recordings were much better on the SDA). Oh yeah, the XT9 is very frustrating on the dash. I wish that there were some way to permanently turn it off.