I started a new job this week as Microsoft Practice Lead for a large international consultancy, one of the great things about starting a new job is the new gadgets that go along with it. My new gadget is my phone, I used to be a Samsung i730 by Verizon, but it was getting old, and I hacked the heck out of it, so it was nice to get a new phone. The phone I opted for is the T-Mobile Dash. The Dash works much better than my i730 did, I thought I would miss going from a touch screen over to the SmartPhone format, but this phone made the switch pretty smooth. It is very easy to navigate the SmartPhone OS using the keys.

The form factor is pretty nice too, it kind of looks like a Blackberry phone, with a qwerty keyboard at the bottom of the phone for typing in my messages. Of course I still have Outlook for synchronizing with the corporate Exchange Server. The Mobile Office Suite is gone, but I really never used them. The phone comes with viewers for Office documents anyway.

A great feature is the support of A2DP for Bluetooth stereo audio streaming. I hooked up my Bluetake iPhones headphones up and I was enjoying my music without wires. The sound was great, and when a call came in, the music stopped, I could answer my phone through the headphones and talk away. Once the call was over, it automatically went back to streaming my music. If you had an i730 you know Verizon stripped this capability out of the i730 (you had to hack the i730 in order to get it, and it was spotty at best).

Another great item is T-Mobile will be coming out with a Windows Mobile 6 version of the Dash, I haven't heard confirmation of an upgrade for Windows Mobile 5 users, but we may see it since Microsoft is providing OEMs the upgrade for free.