Yes indeed, a smartphone with 3G on T-Mobile US! The Dash 3G, otherwise known by its code name, HTC Snap (a name that Sprint stuck with for their HTC Snap), is a Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard Edition smartphone. It has a landscape QVGA non-touchscreen display and a great QWERTY keyboard (we like it best among all the HTC Snap/Ozone variants). Likewise we like the trackball quite well and BlackBerry converts will feel at home.
The Dash 3G offers quite a bit more than the original Dash, including a much faster 528MHz Qualcomm CPU, 256 megs of RAM and flash storage, a GPS that works with Telenav (a $10/month subscription navigation service offered through T-Mobile) as well as Google Maps and Windows Live Search. It has a meager 2 megapixel camera, WiFi and Bluetooth with A2DP Bluetooth stereo support.
Other goodies include HTC’s YouTube player, plenty of IM clients (AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, MySpace IM and Yahoo) and Microsoft’s Office Mobile suite.
If you’re a T-Mobile G1 user who’s tired of the G1’s bulk and poor battery life, the Dash 3G will seem like a thin slice of heaven. It’s extremely thin, small overall and fits in a pocket. The battery life is surprisingly good for a 3G HSDPA phone and ours easily lasted 3 days on a charge with moderate use. MS Direct Push email will eat more battery, so expect more like 1.5 days if you use push email. That’s obviously quite a bit better than the G1’s battery life, but you do forego the touch screen.
The Dash 3G is thin. That’s the volume rocker on the smartphone’s left side, and that’s the only side control.
Above: the Sprint HTC Snap and the Dash 3G.
The Dash 3G went on sale mid-July 2009, and the price seems a bit high at $169 with a 2 year contract. The retail price is quite reasonable at $349, however. If you want a data plan, the phone is available only with T-Mobile’s 3G Smartphone Unlimited data plan ($25/month with no SMS/MMS and $35/month with unlimited messages), just like the G1. A data plan isn’t required though, for those of you who want to save money and use WiFi for data.
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