One of the benefits of WM6 Professional devices is that their touchscreens allow drawing and handwriting. The handwriting recognition is highly accurate, and in Transcriber mode you can write anywhere on the screen to make an entry in a text field. WM6 Professional devices also work well with fingertip pressure, although it takes a fairly strong push to be heard.

Wing doesn't look big enough to have a QWERTY keyboard, and that's central to its charm. The keyboard slides out easily, and it's on a stiff spring so that once it's out, it stays out until you squeeze the case back together. I discovered that giving the case and keyboard a bit of a squeeze causes a timed-out backlight to come back on. Wing's keyboard is unremarkable. The backlighting is uneven, making some of the symbols hard to see in dim light, and the two softkeys that select the left and right functions shown at the bottom of the display aren't backlit at all. You get to know their location. I like that the Shift and Alt modes have LEDs that show they're active, so you'll know that the next keypress will be a capital letter or symbol, respectively.

Wing ships with the display oriented for portrait use, but when you slide the keyboard out it rotates to landscape view. A configurable setting can make landscape orientation the default, and that's how I use it. It's difficult to use Pocket Internet Explorer in portrait mode because I prefer desktop view, which lets you scroll across a site as though it is formatted for a wider PC display. Wing's compact screen is 320 pixels across, and the tightly packed pixels make for relatively sharp text.

Wing lacks in consumer appeal, which isn't a show-stopper for what I classify as an executive phone. Even low-res videos, like those on m.youtube.com, play haltingly in Windows Media Player. The camera, which has HTC's typically rich controls, suffers from unacceptable shutter lag and blur. Like HTC's other Windows Mobile phones (except the X7501, also reviewed here), the headset connector uses extra wires on the USB connector. HTC and T-Mobile include a very cheap headset that plugs into this, but it would have been more useful to have a 3.5mm adaptor to allow the use of a plug-in headset. If you want an external headset, it'll have to be Bluetooth, and fortunately, the quality of Wing's Bluetooth audio is quite good.

Tipping the scales in Wing's favor is its networking. As with Nokia's E65, no one would suspect that anything as small as Wing could do Wi-Fi, but Wing does it, and with surprisingly good performance considering Wing's slow CPU. Downloads of relatively large files are quick, although Pocket IE sometimes forgets it is downloading if you continue surfing while a download is in progress. Fortunately, those who eschew Pocket IE can take comfort in Opera. Along with alternative browsers, the Windows Mobile platform has a public library of software that boggles the mind. The small, light Wing runs it all.

Wing will do anything that any Windows Mobile 6 Professional device can do, which is to say that there's very little it won't do. IT won't have to create any special portals just for your underpowered device. Whatever solutions they create for the best-wired users will work equally well for you and your compact, attractive Wing. You can have a phone that's sleek enough to use in the most formal of settings, and yet powerful enough to tap into every back end and hosted service your company offers.

Mobile professional: BlackBerry Curve, HTC Advantage X7501, and AT&T 8525
BlackBerry 8300, or Curve, is not RIM's first swing at a personal BlackBerry. Indeed, the BlackBerry Pearl is enormously popular as a phone-format BlackBerry device, and predictive typing makes Pearl's abbreviated keypad work better than any other device on the market. Curve is the first personal BlackBerry with a QWERTY keyboard. With the keyboard and trackball, Curve runs the full library of BlackBerry standard and third-party applications with no reduced functionality.

That's not to say that Curve hasn't cut some corners, literally and figuratively. Curve is a lightweight handset with a contoured shape, slightly smaller than the BlackBerry 8800 and much more comfortable to use as a phone. Curve's weight loss comes mostly from a smaller battery, giving Curve more smartphone-like battery life. While the BlackBerry 8800 is a device you can safely charge once a week, Curve is a device that you ought to put on a charger nightly, just like any phone.

I've been a BlackBerry user since that first device that used the two-way paging network, and my primary attraction will always be the keyboard. The curve in Curve could refer to the keyboard layout, which arches steeply on the sides like a 35-toothed grin. There are gaps between the keys, which in my experience makes for slower typing, and the keys have a translucent silver tone with dark legends, which I find harder to read. Further, when the keyboard backlight kicks in, all of the keys light up so brightly that it competes with the display. It's a cool effect in a club, but it's borderline obnoxious in dimly lit business settings. In contrast, the 8800 lights only the legends, which are stark white on black.